Skip to content

Crane castle

For OOI Endurance mooring operations, the team relies on the excellent lifting equipment offered by the R/V Sikuliaq.  Here a recovered surface buoy (about 20 ft tall and 10,000 lbs) is being repositioned using the red starboard crane while science party and deck crew keep things under control with tag lines controlled by air tuggers. …

Read More

Wet Lab view

On this cruise, most of the work occurs on deck as the team deploys and recovers oceanographic moorings. However, at each site, the team takes water samples to compare to the deployed mooring instruments. Here , Marnie Jo Zirbel caps a sample bottle in the wet lab while Jonathan Whitefield goes to draw another seawater…

Read More

Pre-deployment checkout

Each OOI oceanographic mooring carries more than 20 sensors and takes months to prepare for deployment. To make sure everything is working and ready to deploy, Akhil Salim and Kristin Politano review the checklist at the mooring’s bottom lander. In the foreground (red disks), is the top of an acoustic Doppler current profiler.  It looks…

Read More

Working to the weather

Spring in the North Pacific can bring pretty high winds and seas.  When the Endurance 16 team gets good weather, they press on through long days. Here Alex Wick and Kristin Politano get a subsurface float into position on the R/V Sikuliaq during an evening mooring deployment on the OOI Spring Endurance cruise.

Read More

First mooring deployment completed

The Endurance 16 OOI science party and R/V Sikuliaq crew deploy the Washington shelf mooring.  The new mooring will sit side-by-side for a few days with the mooring deployed in September to cross-validate the data.

Read More

Gliders are in the water

  The Endurance 16 team completed its first operation of the Spring 2022 OOI Endurance cruise. Here Linus Stoltz (left) and Jonathan Whitefield (right) prepare a couple of ocean gliders for deployment off Oregon. These gliders are designed to operate for three months at a time and range to about 200 miles offshore during their…

Read More

Putting it all together

From left to right Stuart Pearce, Steve Lambert, and Kristin Politano connect the electrical-mechanical (EM) chain at the base of the Washington shelf buoy.  Before deployment, the mooring is connected from top to bottom, and instruments are turned on and tested.

Read More

Getting shipshape

The deck of R/V Sikuliaq on day 2 of loading for OOI Endurance 16 cruise.  Most of the gear the team needs for leg 1 is loaded.  The remainder of the day the team completed testing of the Washington shelf mooring and tied things down on deck and in the lab.

Read More

Buenos Dias!

Mi nombre es Irene Duran. Mis padres son originalmente de México, pero yo crecí en un pueblo pequeño al norte de California. Soy bailarina, pintora y Asistente de Ingeniería para la Institución Oceanográfica de Woods Hole (WHOI, por sus siglas en inglés) en los Estados Unidos. Trabajo en la en la división de Nodos a…

Read More

More Than Just Moorings

People often wonder if we stand watches on our cruises – work in shifts 24 hours a day.  Because our OOI work is primarily deploying and recovering moorings, the majority of our work happens during daytime when we have sufficient light. Overnight activities include surveys of the Pioneer Array region using ship’s sensors and holding…

Read More