Dubai, United Arab Emirates (Dec. 3, 2023) – Today, leaders at two of the world’s leading ocean science institutions signed a bilateral Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) extending their working partnership in the exploration, study, and protection of the world’s oceans.

After the first tomatoes, salads and potatoes have been grown in space, will astronauts soon raise fish aboard the ISS or on the Moon? That is the challenge of the Lunar Hatch mission carried out by IFREMER.

IFREMER, ISSS and MEP Jutta Paulus are organising the webinar “Marine Test Sites, strengthening the links between Research, Innovation and Industry for a Sustainable Blue Economy” on 26/09/2023 at 15h CEST (1 hour webinar), together with speakers from ENEA, Hydroquest and North Sea Farmers (in partnership with TNO).

In early May, scientists from the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER) and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) installed a new underwater observation system to study the seamounts in the Coral Sea, south of New Caledonia. It will help develop a new generation of multidisciplinary deep-sea observatories.

Understanding whether slow slip along fault boundaries is likely to eventually cause a high-magnitude earthquake is essential in assessing seismic hazards. A study recently published by Ifremer in the journal Nature Communications clearly characterizes the phenomena associated with slow earthquakes further to the analysis of water pressure in marine sediments.

To support its strategy and develop new fields of research, Ifremer sets up a new scheme, the «Blue Chairs», for a maximum duration of 5 years.

On October 25, Ifremer, the CNRS and the IRD, with support from the Ocean & Climate Platform and ESA astronaut Thomas Pesquet, are launching a digital world tour of ocean and climate sciences, christened OneOceanScience.

The deep-sea is the largest ecosystem on Earth. It harbours an impressive biodiversity and provides a great amount of resources yet, it is also the least explored and understood. There is an urgent need of rapid technological developments to access, investigate, understand and protect this unique and remote environment. Furthermore, in the last few years anthropogenic pressures in the deep sea raised exponentially and we are all aware that the deep sea is a treasure of biodiversity, resources and the last frontier on Earth for biomimicry.