'A perfect opportunity': Canadian scientists back at sea on U.S. research vessel

Canadian scientists are back at sea this spring monitoring ocean climate conditions on the East Coast thanks to a data- and ship-sharing agreement between the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

The collaboration will enable ship-challenged Canada to carry out the first spring survey of its Atlantic zone monitoring program in three years.

The twice-yearly missions measure biological, chemical and physical conditions from the Gulf of Maine to the Labrador Sea — information that tracks climate change in the ocean and helps manage fish stocks worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Woods Hole is supplying the research vessel Atlantis and $1.5 million Cdn in crew time as well as instruments for survey work off Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Canada gets Atlantis until the end of May and will pay Woods Hole $5.1 million Cdn.

DFO will collect and share data for scientists at Woods Hole.

"This collaboration builds on decades of collaboration between U.S. and Canadian scientists, trying to understand the dramatic fluctuations that we're seeing in the ocean environment off of our shores," says Dennis McGillicuddy, chief scientist at Woods Hole.

For Canada, the arrangement solves an immediate problem caused by the abrupt — if unsurprising — retirement of Canada's aging oceanographic research ship CCGS Hudson in January.

In recent years, the 59-year-old Hudson was frequently unavailable because of mechanical problems.

A catastrophic motor failure last fall led the Canadian Coast Guard to decommission Hudson rather than spend between $12 million and $20 million on refits that could put it out of service until the end of 2023.

"We were really fortunate to be able to have this collaboration with Woods Hole on such short notice," said Lindsay Beazley, an aquatic science biologist with DFO at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia.

Last week, Beazley completed one leg of the mission on board Atlantis off the Scotian Shelf.

Atlantis has all the bells and whistles, including five laboratories and what's known as an Imaging FlowCytobot.

The submersible instrument takes very high-resolution images of phytoplankton from streams of water samples that are continuously fed onto the ship. The images are then fed back to shore where software identifies the phytoplankton — doing in minutes what would take a person several hours.