The 75th Anniversary of the Swedish ‘Albatross’ Around-the-World deep-sea expedition 1947-1948: Its contribution to ocean science and development of marine measurement- and sampling methods

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the return of the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition to Gothenburg after a 15-month long scientific journey around the world 1947-1948. The initiator and leader of this historical oceanographic expedition with the 4-mast motorized sailing vessel ‘Albatross’ was Professor Hans Pettersson. The sailing route was mainly inside the Tropics to secure the best possible weather conditions throughout the journey. During this expedition the newly invented piston corer by Professor Börje Kullenberg was used which enabled the researchers on board to collect nearly 400 long sediment cores with a maximum length of 20 meters. Final development of this coring device with its free-fall release mechanism and sediment core catcher owes to the innovative efforts of engineer Axel Jonasson. The expedition succeeded in obtaining world-wide undisturbed sediment columns of much greater length than the few meters previously possible to retrieve by gravity-coring. With the appearance of new laboratory methods (e.g. stable isotope chemistry) this made it possible to bridge the gap between oceanography and geology - and a new scientific discipline appeared, namely paleo-oceanography. From now on it was possible with the sediment material from the Albatross expedition to study world ocean processes and linkages in a perspective of up to about two million years, compared to a time frame of less than about a thousand years before. Studies of these sediment cores from the Swedish Deep-Sea Expedition made it also possible to assess influxes of continental-derived sediment material, especially in context with the marine impact of former glaciations and Quaternary climate change. Other important contributions to ocean science included, amongst others, the deployment of new instruments for collecting uncontaminated sea water samples and the measurement of sea water temperature and optical properties. For recording the thickness of sub-bottomsediment layers new seismic exploration methods were introduced by using explosives. At the occasion of its 75^th anniversary, with this presentation we will give an overview of some of the highlights and forthcoming scientific results of the Albatross expedition. This will further be illustrated by some original film clips taken on its journey around the world.