(BV / 15-07-10)  The Spanish oceanographic vessel, Hesperides, will be navigating all seas on Earth for nine months, finishing the circumnavigation of project Malaespina 2010, which will set sail in Cartagena in November to cover 42,000 nautical miles (77,700 km).

It is a scientific campaign in which 400 researchers (250 Spanish) will participate with an ambitious program that includes studies of global change and marine biodiversity. The project, financed with six million euros (especially by the Science and Innovation Ministry) pays honour to the Spanish expedition of Alejandro Malaspina, which sailed from Cadiz on July 30, 1789 with the corvettes Atrevida and Descubierta.

The planned circumnavigation was not finished then, but the cartographers, astronomers, naturalists and painters explored lands and seas of America, Asia and Oceania. It was the most important scientific project overseas in the 18th Century.

From Cartagena, the Hesperides will go to Cadiz (port of departure of Alejandro Malaspina) and, from there, it will go to Rio de Janeiro, Punta Arenas and Ushuaia (in the American South end), Cape Town (South Africa), Perth and Sydney (Australia) and Hawaii; then it will cross the Panama Canal to go to Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) and return to Cadiz and Cartagena eight months and three weeks after the beginning.

Besides the Hesperides, from whose navigation the Spanish Army is in charge, a second Spanish oceanographic vessel participates in the Project, the Sarmiento de Gamboa, which in January 2010 will cross the Atlantic between Cadiz and Miami and come back through the Colombian route, taking samples of all kinds and measuring.

“In the area of global change, Malaspina 2010 will study ocean warming, the sink effect, acidification of water, the contribution of synthetic pollutants, the increasing of ultraviolet radiation and the increasing of abundance of gelatinous organisms,” has explained Duarte, researcher of the CSIC. “In marine biodiversity, the campaign emphasizes the deep ocean.”

Duarte stressed the importance that the sound of marine waters is gaining taking advantage of the latest techniques of Molecular Biology, which allows to identify million of genes so far unknown and with huge economical potential for their possible industrial and pharmaceutical applications.

As a legacy of Malaspina 2010, a sample bank that will be sealed for 30 years as a time capsule is being prepared for them to be analyzed by scientists of future generations.

Aguilar has remembered that the Hesperides has been doing campaigns in the Antarctica for 20 years, and the last year it was in the Arctic “but in Malaspina 2010 she will be at seas she has never sailed before”.

In the Project some institutions of the Army will participate too, such as the Naval Museum, the Royal Navy Observatory and the Navy Hydrographical Institute, which are preparing different exhibitions and activities on the issue, according to Carlos Breijo, Admiral of Navy General Services.