Report of the TANGO 1 expedition to the West Antarctic Peninsula

The TANGO1 expedition ventured to accumulate new data on the responses of marine ecosystems to shifts in ice regimes in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP), taking full advantage of a nimble sampling platform, the R/V Australis, a steel hulled, fully rigged motor sailor. TANGO1 took place between February and March 2023, sampling two main locations at different spatial scales. Deploying 14 different types of gear (both traditional and modern), the TANGO1 team gathered over 4000 samples that will be brought back to Belgium for further analysis. The team focused on synchronized, transdiciplinary sampling to understand the linkages between realms (atmosphere, sea-ice, watercolumn, seafloor) and there potential responses to changes in climate-changed linked ice regime at various spatial scales.
The use of R/V Australis for coastal studies deemed to be extremely efficient, in terms of environmental impact (ca. 40 times less CO2 emissions than a Polar class icebreaker) and reactivity, allowing the team to adapt the sampling efforts in function of the weather or anchoring conditions. Fully devoted to the expedition, the ship allowed the B121 team to sample in shallow areas, not accessible to icebreaker and too far away from research stations, and which have been under sampled.
The preliminary (meta)results accumulated during TANGO1 confirm the efficiency of using a nimble research platform to study fine-scale processes in the shallow areas of unchartered regions of the West Antarctic Peninsula. TANGO1 provides a first-hand experience to carry an ambitious TANGO2 expedition. Based upon Open Science approaches, the combination of B121/TANGO1 efficiency in sampling paves the way to testing the transposability of the concept to multiply similar efforts in a coordinated fashion.