1.1. Research platform

The Danish King Christian VIII sent the first Galathea Expedition to the Far East in 1845-1847. The second Galathea Expedition took place 100 years later from 1950-1952, devoted primarily to ethnographic research. The present paper describes data collected on the Galathea III Expedition which was undertaken from August 2006 through April 2007. Figure 1 shows the Royal Danish Navy (RDN) vessel Vsdderen which was converted to a research platform for the expedition.

2.2 Data collection

Data was integrated over 10-minute intervals and recorded with a Cambridge Scientific CR10X data logger along with date, time and position information. Data was uploaded via a satellite link to the internet weekly. Thanks to excellent support from the Danish Department of Fisheries a complete data set is available for every single day of the 8 month expedition. This high level of data integrity is partly because the data logger was battery powered with a continuous trickle charge and could be independent of external power during for up to several days if necessary. The complete data set has been placed on the internet, and it is available in Excel format at the home page www. soldata. dk. Click on the link “Galathea data…”.