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The goal of the program is to increase biological knowledge of the Antarctic ecosystems and of the organisms of the region, and to assess and predict the possible effects of environmental change and human impacts on them.
Korean Antarctic Research Program (KARP) supports scientists to understand the Antarctic and its role in global processes. Researches are performed at the King Sejong station and onboard various vessels in the Antarctic Peninsula region. Highlights of the research include multidisciplinary biology and ocean sciences. The overall objectives are to investigate living resources in the area and to study how the environment changes cause the fluctuations associated with the global warming and the annual depletion of the ozone layer above Antarctica.
The specific objectives of the oceanographic, biological cruises and the shore-based studies are 1) to understand structure and function of marine ecosystem, geochemical process on particle flux and energy flow, and effects on marine ecosystem with global environment changes (ozone depletion and global warming); 2) to understand energy and carbon flow connecting marine and terrestrial ecosystem near King Sejong Station with relationship to global environmental changes.
Biological oceanographic research is designed to examine physical and biological processes that give rise to high biological productivity in the marginal sea ice-edge zone of the northwestern Weddell Sea and to look for a phytoplankton "bloom" effect over all trophic level. Although a number of previous studies had sampled at or near the Weddell Sea area, a little mesoscale study had investigated the coupling between the physical processes and the interactions among bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, krill, and benthos within the Weddell Sea ice-edge ecosystem. The cruise focuses on a small, but representative, geographic region, with a research plan for high-resolution sampling.
A new understanding of ecosystem dynamics and the mesoscale upper-ocean circulation can emerge only from intensive study of a more restricted geographic region. Our study has investigated two major questions: What are the mechanisms which result in enhanced productivity at all trophic levels in nearshore waters? Is the ice-edge region an ecological interface among distinct biological communities, one associated with the open ocean and one with ice-edge waters? and what are the dynamics of these regional communities? To address these questions, we measure the distributions of bacteria, phytoplankton, and zooplankton and, whenever possible, their rate processes, over a wide range of conditions in the different regions and the relations with physical and chemical parameters.
In coastal region field and laboratory work have been done on shallow water benthic organisms. Experimental studies on feeding physiology and ecology of the Antarctic benthos in Marian Cove have been conducted to evaluate the contribution of this species to organic carbon flux in the Antarctic coastal waters. In addition, sediment trap is deployed near the base to estimate the natural sedimentation of organic carbon, and the relative importance of biological process of this species in the natural sedimentation is evaluated. Macroalgae are sampled from several stations in Maxwell Bay to study community structure and to elucidate environmental parameters determining the structure. | |
Research Activities > Major Topics > Biological Sciences
