The Great Scientific Swim around Iceland

The Great Scientific Swim around Iceland: 1,000 Miles in 100 Days, Killer Whales & 100 Waves Ross Edgley Takes on a Historic Open Water Challenge and collaborate with MFRI, Matís and Háskóli Ísland to develop citizen science.

In 2025, ultra-marathon sea swimmer Ross Edgley will attempt a historic first - swimming over 1,000 miles (1,610 km) around Iceland’s entire coastline while conducting crucial ocean conservation research. Ross will leave the harbour of Reykjavík the 16th of May and will swim around Iceland in a clockwise manner, see introduction video here and here. 

More than just a world-first endurance feat, Ross expedition is also a pioneering citizen science study which generally means collection and analysis of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public, typically as part of a collaborative project with professional scientists. Matís and MFRI, through the BioProtect EU mission project funded in 2024, have set up a collaborative effort with Ross team to study biodiversity in the ocean around Iceland. BioProtect mission is to develop tools to protect and restore ecosystems and biodiversity to reach the objectives of the COP22 target, e.g. ensure the conservation of 30% of our ocean by 2030.

One of these tools is environmental DNA (eDNA) citizen science. eDNA is DNA shed by organisms in their habitat in the form of cells, mucus, feces or gametes. This DNA can be collected just by filtering water samples from the ocean on specific filters which are then brought to a DNA laboratory for eDNA amplification. Once the eDNA is amplify, scientists compare the sequences they obtained to the different world databases to identify the organisms (from genus to species) which were present in the ocean.

One of the other reasons that BioProtect partners want to collaborate with Ross is that the ocean is vast, and scientists cannot be at sea constantly to monitor the organism’s migration and/or dynamics. It is costly and requires manpower. By collaborating with citizen and promoting tools like eDNA, BioProtect can accumulate data which would not have been available otherwise.

In addition, Ross team will collect also water samples between for researchers from the University of Iceland, the University of Victoria (Canada) and MFRI, supported by Future Oceans International to analyse and map microplastic distribution in the waters around Iceland. He will also team up with the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute of Iceland to identify marine mammals using photo identification methods and contribute to the ISMN catalogue (ÍSland Megaptera Novaeangliae), the Icelandic National catalogue and the killer whale one.

More information about the BioProtect project here

Icelandic contact persons for the collaboration with Ross on citizen science:
Angel Ruiz Angulo – Microplastic, Christophe Pampoulie – eDNA citizen science, Davið Gíslason – eDNA citizen science and  Valerie Chosson – Microplastic, whale migration and photo-ID

A link to an interview with Ross Edgley in the Icelandic web media Visir.is. A picture on this page was posted in that interview. 
A link to an interview with Ross Edgley on Adventure.com. A picture on this page was posted in that interview. 

Environmental DNA (eDNA) citizen science sampler