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April 24, 2012

Baltic Expedition 2012 – We’re off!

 

You may remember last year around this time, we launched our first ever expedition into the Baltic Sea. It’s that time of year again! Our chartered research vessel, the Hanse Explorer, set sail yesterday.

Our team will spend two months covering 7,000 miles through the waters of the nine countries bordering the Baltic Sea (Denmark, Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, Finland, and Sweden). They will visit several areas we discovered last year of high environmental value and conduct more in depth research so as to be able to provide the governments around the Baltic with strong information supporting the creation of more MPAs (and better management in those already existing) in this threatened sea. They will also be documenting any illegal, destructive, and unsustainable fishing activities that they are able to spot – an unfortunately common occurrence in the Baltic Sea.

We are privileged to be able to back up our policy work with strong scientific data – that is why these expeditions, and the information we collect over the course of our time at-sea, are such an important part of our campaigns.  
Our Executive Director, Xavier Pastor, is leading the expedition and tweeting about it! So be sure to follow up on twitter: Oceana_XPastor

We’ve also set up a Baltic Expedition 2012 page on our site, where we’ll be posting on-board diaries, images and updates from the team.

We’re excited to see what’s in store! Let us know if there is anything in particular you are curious to hear about!