Lake Geneva: more going on under the surface than we know
LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Elemo, short for Exploration des eaux lémaniques (exploring Lake Geneva’s waters) got underway Tuesday, with Russian Mir submersibles heading 200 metres down into the canyons and cliffs of Lake Geneva. The project is based at the EPFL, the federal polytechnic in Lausanne.
One of Elemo’s first tests will help researchers to understand how the cliffs, which are essentially unstable heaps of sediment as high as 50 metres at a depth of as much as 200 metres, were formed by the Rhone, through sampling and then dating the sediment. A second will measure the amount of methane released from the deep canyons as organic matter decomposes.
Methane is a greenhouse gas.
Stephanie Girardclos, from the University of Geneva, heads the project with these two studies, for which four researchers going on the dives will be gathering data this week.
Elemo includes 15 other projects, mostly environmental, with researchers looking at micropollutants, biology, geology and the physics of currents. A succession of teams will work throughout the summer on various dive sites, says the EPFL.
Flavio Anselmetti, a researcher for the Swiss aquatic research institute Eawag, who is part of the Elemo team, says new data could help us better understand the lake, including historical events. “A collapse of the canyon could be what caused the tsunami that swept across the lake and destroyed the bridges in Geneva in 563,” he says. “These are extremely rare events, but it’s important to assess the risk.”
The canyons are formed as the Rhone pours into it: the river is colder and sediment-rich from glacier-fed streams and rivers in canton Valais and eastern Vaud. It continues to flow through the lake. “It really is a river at the bottom of the lake, carving out valleys as it meanders along,” says Anselmetti.
The lake remains a mystery in many ways, surprising considering that half of the drinking water for the population of 1.5 million in the region comes from the lake.
Eawag is responsible for four of the projects.
International scientists have access to the submersibles for research purposes thanks to support from Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Saint Prex, canton Vaud, the Russian Federation’s Honorary Consulate in Lausanne and the EPFL. Ferring is financing most of the project and the company’s chairman, Frederik Paulsen, was at the site of the first dives Tuesday. He was joined by Don Walsh, an American oceanographer who was with Jacques Piccard during their famous descent into the Mariana Trench 23 January 1960, the deepest point of the world’s ocean, in the bathyscaphe Trieste. It went down to a record maximum of 10,911 metres.
Background story, GenevaLunch, 1 March 2011
Mir submersibles, made in Russia, have been used for numerous scientific missions in the Arctic and Lake Baikal. They were also used to film the hulk of the Titanic for James Cameron's film about the sinking of the ship. They will be used in Lake Geneva to help scientists better understand western Europe's largest lake (source: EPFL).
Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Russian Mir submersibles will soon populate the depths of Lake Geneva, the EPFL, the Swiss federal polytechnic institute in Lausanne announced Tuesday 1 March. Fifteen teams from five countries will carry out field research using the submersibles, from June 2011 to August, in a project dubbed elemo.
Geology, biology (especially micro-pollutants and bacteriology) and physics projects will be undertaken to better understand how human activity affects the lake.
The submersibles will operate in three main areas:
- Vidy, near Lausanne, a heavily-populated area where the impact of micro-pollutants can be studied
- mid-lake directly offshore from Lausanne, going as deep as 309 metres, a depth at which little is known about the lake
- Villeneuve, where glacial deposits and sediment have created 30-metre high canyons in the lake: a spectacular, unstable part of the lake that begs exploration.
Lake Geneva, looking from Saint Prex to Lausanne: windy on the surface and largely unknown at its depths (click on image to view larger)
International scientists will have access to the submersibles for research purposes, thanks to support from Ferring Pharmaceuticals in Saint Prex, canton Vaud, the Russian Federation’s Honorary Consulate in Lausanne and the EPFL. Ferring is financing most of the project.
“One-and-a-half million people live near Lake Geneva. Fifty percent of this population gets its daily drinking water from the lake. Yet there is still much to learn about the complex workings of this heavily human-impacted ecosystem,” the EPFL notes in its press release.
“The researchers will gain easy access to the deepest parts of the lake, at depths of over 300 meters, where they will be able to study how pollutants accumulate, and even perform field experiments. The lake consists of layers of water that are permeable to differing degrees. By using the submersibles to carry out a detailed study of the boundaries between these layers, the researchers will be able to better understand how the water circulates. Over time, these models will be of the utmost importance for measuring the local and overall impact of human activity on Lake Geneva.”
The 15 teams include scientists from several institutions: the EPFL, the Universities of Geneva, Neuchatel, Haute-Savoie and Newcastle, Eawag (the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and
Technology), Inra (the National Agronomic Research Institute) in Toulouse, the CNRS (French National Centre for Research), the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Anatoly Sagalevitch, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the expedition leader for many missions on board the Mir submersibles, notably in the Arctic and Lake Baikal, will join the project for the summer of 2011, with his team.
The 18.6 tons deep-diving vehicles are 7.8 metres long and 3.6m wide. They can reach depths of over 6,000 metres and move at a speed of 9 kph horizontally, 40 kph vertically.
Geneva's Mont Blanc McDonald's sports the new look
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The latest company to leave the UK and move to Switzerland is fast food giant McDonald’s, which will shift its European head office to Geneva later in 2009, the Tribune de Geneve reported late Friday. European president Denis Hennequin and a small team of possibly a dozen people will make the move. The Tribune says the company will be housed in the former offices of Bank Mirabaud on Boulevard du Théâtre, but the company has said only that details will be announced closer to the date of the move.
The UK’s Telegraph newspaper links the move to a change in the UK’s “taxation of foreign profits linked to intellectual property rights such as patents and trademarks” but it notes that the company stresses its tax rate will remain virtually unchanged.
