The VISION-Cruise cruise (chief scientist: Bernhard Fuchs) was departing on September 20, 2006 from Reykjavik and arrived in Lisbon on October 3, 2006. On short notice, the new German research vessel Maria S. Merian had become a ship of opportunity and was used for a fast transect sampling along the 30°W meridian from the cold polar to the subtropical waters around the Azores.

The ship party - including 20 faculty members and students of the International Max Planck Research School of Marine Microbiology (MARMIC), and two guests from US and UK -
did 19 stations investigating the phytoplankton and bacterioplankton communities in the surface water column of the North Atlantic Ocean.