Dispatch 12: Recovery of Mooring B
Ashley Arroyo (Yale University)
September 10, 2024
18:00 UTC, 78.00°N 149.59°W
Conditions:
- Mostly cloudy
- 50% sea ice cover
- -3.3°C
- Winds 7.3 knots southeasterly
- Sunrise: 09-Sep-2024 07:57:11 -06
- Sunset: 09-Sep-2024 23:56:44 -06
- Day length: 15h 59mn 32s
Today, the buoy/mooring team from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) recovered Mooring B, which was deployed on the BGOS/JOIS expedition in 2023. The mooring has been recording ocean and sea ice properties all year, and the team is eager to collect the data from each of the instruments. Once the Louis arrived at the location of last year’s deployment, Mary-Louise Timmermans and the WHOI team began communicating with the mooring by sending it an acoustic signal through the seawater. Devices on the mooring send pings to the ship team, which allow them to pinpoint its precise location. The science team was then able to send a signal to these devices to release the mooring from its seafloor anchor (including its sensors which are vertically positioned along a ~3800-meter wire, all held up by a surface float), causing the yellow surface buoy to emerge at the ocean’s surface. Once the buoy was floating in the water, deckhand Jerome Sibley was lowered in the man-basket to hook the mooring so it could be brought on board.
Unlike the buoys we deploy, the moorings do not transmit data throughout the year, so we can only retrieve the data from the past year after the mooring is recovered. Once the mooring recovery was completed, Mary-Louise and the WHOI team quickly went to work re-programming the mooring equipment to prepare it for re-deployment tomorrow! In the meantime, other members of the science crew have been busy completing the CTD/bongo casts at this location. We will remain at the mooring site until tomorrow once the re-deployment of Mooring B is complete!
