New Tara expedition dedicated to ocean microbes crucial for major planetary balances

On December 12, 2020, five years after the adoption of the Paris Agreement, the schooner Tara will set sail from Lorient, her home port, to embark on a new major scientific expedition. Over nearly two years, the sailing laboratory will travel 70,000 kilometers in the South Atlantic, along the South American and African coasts and as far as Antarctica. Conceived by the Tara Ocean Foundation and its scientific partners including the CNRS, CEA, SZN and EMBL, this mission involves 42 research institutions from around the world. It aims to study the ocean’s most fundamental fabric — the microbiome — to understand the functioning of this ecosystem in a context of ongoing global change.