Bouvetøya is the most remote island in the world, and it supports a surprisingly rich ecosystem, from phytoplankton and krill to seabirds, seals and whales. BOUVECO aims to find out what drives this ecosystem: whether the nutrients come from deep water upwelled over the seafloor topography (possibly enriched by hydrothermal vents), from glacial runoff, or from melting icebergs. The project also studies how this productivity supports predators and how much carbon is exported to the deep ocean and seafloor.
At NORCE, Andreas Klocker develops a high-resolution ocean model of the waters around Bouvetøya using the Oceananigans framework, running on Norway's new GPU supercomputers. The model resolves how the Antarctic Circumpolar Current interacts with the island's topography, and where nutrients are lifted to the surface and retained. He also contributes to the physical oceanographic observations during the research cruise in 2027, and the model will be evaluated against these data. Together they provide the physical context for the biological and geochemical studies in the project.
Bouvetøya is a Norwegian dependency with potential future interest in fisheries and seabed mining, but there is almost no baseline knowledge with which to assess the impacts of such activities or of climate change. BOUVECO will provide the baseline needed for sustainable management, including under CCAMLR.
