standardization of environmental data and information - International ...

Future studies
Regarding future environmental studies, Lee said KORDI was
currently focussing on the relinquishment in 2002 of part of the Korean
claim area to ISA and thus had postponed further environmental work until
2003. Much data had been gathered from the sea surface during the last
ten years, but there had been no moves toward measurements near the
seafloor. This was a challenging area, as deep-tow systems could not be
towed at more than two knots. KORDI was planning to focus on thorough
investigations of several local representative areas instead of the broad
regional studies that it had been conducting. Rather than concentrating
exclusively on manganese nodules, it wanted to develop technologies
useful in other areas of marine science, and it was working in hydrothermal
and other areas on the seafloor. Technology and vehicles that could
operate at the five-km depths where nodules were found could do many
other things in shallower environments. For instance, his Institute was
thinking of working after 2003 on very high frequency near-bottom acoustic
measurements to understand nodule distribution, an area on which the
Americans had discontinued research in the 1980s. Since it would provide
a high quality image of the seafloor, this work might be of interest in
environmental studies. Recently, the Korean Government had approved the
development of ROVNav (remotely operated vehicle – navigation) as a
multipurpose transceiver technology with applications in the manganese
nodule area.
SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION
Fauna
Asked about the condition of megafauna collected with otter trawls
and beam trawls, and specifically whether they had been ground by the
nodules in the trawlers, Dr. Kim said many had been damaged by beam
trawlers but a number of good specimens had been retrieved.
Macrofauna had been collected from as far down as about 4800-
5700 m. Large colonies of foraminiferans had been found on the
manganese nodules. Macrofauna and meiofauna had been differentiated
by species but the data had been compiled only at the genus level.
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