The RRS Discovery will depart from Punta Arenas at the beginning of December for the second CUSTARD expedition. Scientists and engineers will once again head to remote waters beyond the southwest tip of Chile where they will spend Christmas and New Year! They will be recovering a glider deployed on the previous cruise, deploying further gliders, CTDs, a marine snow catcher, underwater vision profiler and ARGO floats. Samples will be collected for processing and experiments on board ship as well back on land.

CUSTARD brings together an international collaboration of scientists and engineers from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), the Universities of Southampton, Plymouth, East Anglia and Oxford, and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in the UK, as well as the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) in the US. In addition, the project is also assisted by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the US Ocean Observatories Initiative, the Monterey Bay Research Institute (MBARI) and the SOCCOM project.