Discover this! — SeaSTORE research cruise DY213
University of Leeds and the Natural History Museum London
In July and August of 2026, 30 marine scientists aboard the RRS Discovery sailed around the Irish Sea with one goal: to better understand the environmental impacts of bottom trawling on the seabed. Bottom trawling is a method of commercial fishing that involves dragging heavy nets along the seafloor to catch bottom-dwelling target species such as cod and langoustines. This practice not only collects these animals, but traps anything in its path including marine mammals, rays, and seabirds, while also disturbing the bottom sediment and damaging fragile seabed habitats. The seafloor is known to act as a ‘blue carbon’ sink, storing millions of tonnes of organic carbon and thus playing a critical role in long-term climate regulation. The impacts of bottom trawling on the ability of the seafloor to store carbon is not well known. The research happening aboard this ship represented a groundbreaking study addressing these critical knowledge gaps of bottom trawling fisheries on climate change.
I was lucky enough to be one of these researchers aboard this cruise, thanks to support from the Challenger Society for Marine Science Travel Award. We were at sea for three and a half weeks, with teams from the University of Leeds, Bangor University, Imperial College London, Heriot-Watt University, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries, and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) working in collaboration on the project entitled SeaSTORE (Bottom trawling Impact on SEAbed carbon STORagE, funded by NERC). We had the opportunity to directly follow UK fishing vessels to sample the disturbed seafloor sediment and water column, measuring and analysing seabed composition, biogeochemistry, and biodiversity.
I gained experience in important oceanographic skills, such as deploying megacore equipment and Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD) profilers, as well as interesting scientific methods like community oxygen consumption incubation and core porewater analysis. Just as valuable, though, are the connections I made with the fellow scientists and crew on board. Living and working at sea alongside people who share your curiosities and passions creates a unique sense of camaraderie that is hard to replicate anywhere else. Long days (and nights) of science, shared meals, and unforgettable experiences at sea quickly turns colleagues into friends, and I am certain many of these relationships will develop into long-term friendships and future scientific collaborations.
Awardee Profile:
Lauren Geiser is a PhD student at the University of Leeds and the Natural History Museum London. She studies deep-sea bivalve molluscs from the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a region in the Pacific Ocean that is being targeted for the deep-sea mining of polymetallic nodules. Her research focuses on the shell microstructure, sclerochronologically-derived growth rates, and phylogeny and taxonomy of these tiny and fragile bivalves. She completed her MSc in Sustainability and Environmental Modelling at the University of Dundee, focusing on the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining and bottom trawling. Before that she completed her BSc at the University of Dayton in Ohio, with a double major in Biology and Mathematics and a minor in Chemistry.