Next Sunday, 22 November, six women will cast off from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria aboard Lady Magellan, a 46 foot sailing boat, to cross the Atlantic in ARC 2026, the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers, with a floating laboratory on board. Skipper and owner Paola Catapano is a science communicator at CERN and founder of Polarquest, a citizen science association that sails for research. Her crew scientist is Dr Meganne Christian, selected as a European Space Agency reserve astronaut in 2022, who has completed two missions at Concordia Station in Antarctica. With them sail Elena Gazzarrini, a physicist and science communicator, on media; Maria Lopez Quiroga, a neuroscientist and medical doctor, as medical officer; Flora Laidlow, a new mechanical engineering graduate, as engineer; and Helen Morris, an international lawyer and refugee advocate, on safety and sustainability. Ahead lie about 2,700 nautical miles, with arrival in Rodney Bay, Saint Lucia, planned for 19 December.
All the way across, the crew doubles as a team of citizen scientists. For the Sealabs project, run by Ambiente Europeo, they will regularly sample seawater and measure its salinity, temperature and pH, gathering readings from waters research ships rarely visit. With CERN Knowledge Transfer's TIMEPIX@school project, a particle detector on board will count cosmic radiation, and schools can follow the raw counts live as the boat crosses. Their campaign also includes environmental DNA sampling in the Canary Islands with Professor Elena Valsecchi of the University of Milan Bicocca, part of the SpotTheMonk project looking for traces of the Mediterranean monk seal in a cup of seawater. Anyone can follow along: Polarquest's live tracker shows Lady Magellan's position, the crew posts on Polarquest's Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, and World Cruising Club streams the start live on YouTube and Facebook.
Sources and links
An Earth to Sea News story, drawn from Polarquest and World Cruising Club. Photographs: as credited in captions.
