Team TNV

Research Vessel RV Sindhu Sankalp, owned and operated by the CSIR-National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), has successfully completed 100 oceanographic expeditions in the seas around India, including Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.

For the 100th cruise, RV Sindhu Sankalp sailed from Visakhapatnam Port on March 2 with an objective to map parts of the Eastern Continental Margin of India, especially in the region off Visakhapatnam, with a multi-beam sonar system to unravel the seafloor morphology.

The 56.3 meters long, vessel, originally built as a Training Vessel by the Japanese Government, was acquired by the CSIR-NIO in 2008 and has been modified in 2009 as an oceanographic research vessel by creating laboratories and fitting with several scientific equipments.

Speaking about the success, NIO acting director Dr Prasanna Kumar said that the seafloor information from high resolution mapping and sampling with RV Sindhu Sankalp helped in identifying suitable areas for offshore development and mineral prospecting including petroleum hydrocarbons.

“Experiments were conducted to understand the importance of sedimentary processes in the burial of organic matter and sequestering of atmospheric carbon dioxide in marine sediments which play a significant role in global carbon budget,” he explained.

Dr Kumar said that the vessel has been extensively used to deploy and recover instrumented mooring which record continuous data of various water column parameters, such as temperature, salinity, currents, nutrients etc, which are essential to understand ocean environment and associated ecosystem, including fisheries.

Besides this, the RV contributed significantly for industrial development, especially in the Krishna-Godavari Basin by conducting seabed geophysical and environmental surveys. The recent such survey for evaluating ecological status was conducted in the coastal waters off Mumbai.