Overview
The U.S. GEOTRACES GP17-OCE expedition departed Papeete, Tahiti (French Polynesia) on December 1st, 2022 and arrived in Punta Arenas, Chile on January 25th, 2023. The cruise took place in the South Pacific and Southern Oceans aboard the R/V Roger Revelle with a team of 34 scientists lead by Ben Twining (Chief Scientist), Jessica Fitzsimmons and Greg Cutter (Co-Chief Scientists). GP17 was planned as a two-leg expedition, with its first leg (GP17-OCE) as a southward extension of the 2018 GP15 Alaska-Tahiti expedition and a second leg (GP17-ANT; November 29, 2023 - January 29, 2024) into coastal and shelf waters of Antarctica's Amundsen Sea.
The South Pacific and Southern Oceans sampled by GP17-OCE play critical roles in global water mass circulation and associated global transfer of heat, carbon, and nutrients. Specific oceanographic regions of interest for GP17-OCE included: the most oligotrophic gyre in the global ocean, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) frontal region, the previously unexplored Pacific- Antarctic Ridge, the Pacific Deep Water (PDW) flow along the continental slope of South America, and the continental margin inputs potentially emanating from South America.
Additional Resources
Dates: 6-8 May, 2020
Information: This online planning meeting brought together researchers who expected to submit proposals for one or both of the GP17 expeditions. Link to the workshop announcement.
Contacts:
Greg Cutter [[email protected]], or
Ben Twining [[email protected]]
- U.S. GEOTRACES GP17-OCE Pre-Cruise Planning Meeting
Dates: 17-18 March, 2022
Location: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. Venue website and map.
Objective: Coordinate the scientific objectives and supporting logistics for the research cruise from Tahiti to Chile (GP17-OCE) planned for December 2022-January 2023. The GP17-OCE transect will include a nearly meridional section from 20°S to 67°S, a zonal section along 67°S from 135° to 100°W, and a margin section from 67°S 100°W to the Chilean margin. Cruise leaders: Ben Twining, Jessica Fitzsimmons and Greg Cutter.
Links:
-> Agenda
-> Section Goals - Introductory Presentation
- U.S. GEOTRACES GP17-OCE Data Synthesis Workshop
Dates: 10-12 March, 2025
Location: Texas A&M University.
Summary: A data synthesis workshop for the U.S. GEOTRACES section GP17-OCE was held at Texas A&M University from March 10 to 12, 2025. Leading up to the workshop, GP17-OCE organized virtual synthesis seminars biweekly from January through March 2025 to prepare investigators for the in-person event. Early data from GP17-OCE submitted for IDP2025 included: hydrography and macronutrient data, pigments, dissolved barium concentrations, dissolved 226Ra, size-fractionated PIC, dissolved gallium, dissolved total and labile cobalt, aerosol and seawater 7Be.
- GP17 Statements of Interest: Links to all the submitted statements of interest to aid in the management proposal preparation for each cruise.
- Collection of slides illustrating the oceanographic features that motivated this cruise:
- GP17-OCE
Management Proposals Summaries
Cruise Information
- Cruise Report (pdf format)
- Blogs and Social Media Posts
Additional cruise information is available the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R):
Datasets
Parameters sampled and other relevant metadata available from the Biological & Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office (BCO-DMO):
GP17-OCE: AGU Special Collection of Papers
September 3, 2025
AGU has approved a special collection for the GP17-OCE section, as we agreed to pursue at the March synthesis meeting at TAMU. Global Biogeochemical Cycles will be the lead journal, and we will also be able to submit collection papers to Geophysical Research Letters, JGR-Oceans, and Earth and Space Sciences. Jess and I will serve as associate editors for GBC submissions, and the other journals will use their regular editorial boards.
The collection call for submissions is now available here. If you submit a manuscript to one of the non-GBC journals, please send me and Jess a heads up so that we can keep track of submissions.
AGU encourages the use of the preprint server ESS Open Archive to publish preprints of manuscripts that reference each other, which relieves authors of uploading drafts of unpublished references as part of their submission package.
We have been given a window of 2 years for submissions, and all published papers will be linked together, as done for GP15 here.
Ben,
Benjamin Twining ([email protected])
Funding and Support
