RRS Discovery Cruise DY077, 14 Apr - 01 May 2017. Cruise to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain sustained observatory

The Discovery slipped moorings in Southampton at 0830h GMT on Friday 14th April 2017 after an uneventful mobilisation apart from the discovery that on opening one of the sealed boxes of mooring rope for the PAP#1 mooring, it was found to be empty. Discovery arrived at PAP at 2005h for our first station, a CTD rosette cast to 100m. The Discovery left the site at 1645h on Friday 28th April, somewhat earlier than expected due to a predicted storm which did indeed cause some difficulties for the ship during the return to the UK coming alongside at Portland at 1100h on Monday 1st May to exchange personnel and equipment. Moorings were slipped at 0800h on 2nd May followed by equipment trials and a final docking at Southampton NOC at 2000h on 2nd May. The Porcupine Abyssal Plain Observatory is a sustained, multidisciplinary observatory in the North Atlantic coordinated by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. For over 20 years the observatory has provided key time-series datasets for analysing the effect of climate change on the open ocean and deep-sea ecosystems. More information on PAP can be found in NOCs website at: http://projects.noc.ac.uk/pap/ where the most current data can be found: http://projects.noc.ac.uk/pap/pap-april-2017 PAP is one of the 23 fixed-point open ocean observatories included in the Europe-funded project FixO3, coordinated by Professor Richard Lampitt at NOC: http://www.fixo3.eu/ This 4-year project started in September 2013 with the aim to integrate the open ocean observatories operated by European organizations and is a collaboration of 29 partners from 10 different countries