Japan Ocean Research Ship on First Cruise

The research vessel tied off at the B Street Pier in downtown San Diego is enough to turn local oceanographers green with envy.

Everything on board the $80-million, 330-foot boat is state-of-the-art.

It has room on board for at least 70 scientists. Its laboratories include an array of scientific equipment that allow the ocean-going study of physical chemistry, biological oceanography, meteorology, geology, geophysics, marine biology and fisheries science.

The Hakuho-Maru, owned by the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute, is on a five-month maiden cruise that is designed to give its scientists an opportunity to study global trends.

The cruise will take the Hakuho-Maru to the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea.

The research vessel, which left Japan on Oct. 30, tied up in San Diego, its first port of call, in a gesture of cooperation with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

UCSD last year signed a research agreement with the University of Tokyo’s Ocean Research Institute.

During the expedition, researchers on board Hakuho-Maru will conduct “global scale research” that will attempt to broaden understanding of the complicated relationship that exists among living organisms, the atmosphere, the ocean and land.

While in San Diego, scientists aboard the Hakuho-Maru will host a private reception for “government officials and special friends of Scripps/UCSD and the University of Tokyo,” according to Scripps spokeswoman Cindy Clark.