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A University College Dublin scientist has secured a lead role in a three-year global expedition to explore how climate change affects the oceans.

On board a 36 metre schooner, a team of researchers and marine experts will use modern technology to map the smallest life forms in the sea.

The €15 million  expedition, run by the Tara Endowment Fund, will collect and analyse hundreds of thousands of plankton samples from up to 2,000 metres below the surface.

Microbiologist Dr Emmanuel Reynaud will create scientific images of every pieceof plankton collected.

“Fifty per cent of the world’s CO2 production is absorbed by planktonicorganisms, most of which measure less than 1mm,” he said. “Our future is bound to the fate of the microscopic life in the oceans.”

The team’s Tara Oceanssailing ship will travel about 150,000km across the Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

It will measure past and future impact of CO2 emissions on plankton, explore where ocean life has been disturbed or unexpectedly adapted, compare major coral reefs and record marine pollution.

Dr Reynaud, originally from France, is based in UCD’s School of Biology and Environmental Science.

Findings from the expedition, which leaves the French port of Lorient on Saturday, will help explain how plankton adjust to abrupt changes in the environment and understand what causes ocean desertification, where little life exists as a result of human CO2 production.

Oceanographers, ecologists, biologists and physicists from around the world will combine advanced cell imaging and genetics techniques with oceanography and ecology expertise to map the world’s plankton.