Arcturus expedition
1925 scientific expedition supported by the New York Zoological Society
The Arcturus expedition was a six-month-long research expedition from New York, to the Sargasso Sea, Cocos Island, and finally, the Galápagos Islands, led by naturalist William Beebe. The expedition occurred in 1925 on the Arcturus vessel. The expedition included six female explorers.
Vessel
The Arcturus vessel was supported by the New York Zoological Society (currently the Wildlife Conservation Society), and the expedition was the first oceanographic mission backed by the organization. Harrison Williams provided three-fourths of the expedition cost, while Henry D. Whiton provided the vessel. Though Beebe and others called Arcturus a "steam yacht", it was actually a converted cargo ship. It had been built as a wooden-hulled Design 1065 ship for the United States Shipping Board's Emergency Fleet Corporation during World War One; originally named SS Clio, it had later been acquired by Union Sulphur Company, of which Whiton was the former president. Arcturus was coal-fueled, had an internal volume of 2,400 gross register tons (GRT), and was equipped with eight data collection lines hanging in the water. The data collection methods attached to these lines included surface nets, an otter trawl, vertical nets, plankton nets, a Petersen trawl, a dredge, tangles, sounding, a water bottle, and a thermometer. The vessel also included a platform for researchers to access the surface water more easily.
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This entry incorporates text from “Arcturus expedition” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.