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Ready to go home

At the end of an expedition everyone’s eager to get home. Here the R/V Sikuliaq approaches NOAA’s pier in Newport, OR, but there’s one more chore to do – get that recovered equipment off the deck.  You might be surprised at how quickly a motivated crew and science party can offload.  Within 2 and half…

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OOI team members on trap

It’s a tradition for folks to sign the sediment traps as they are put out for six months at sea.  This trap contains the names of the OOI team members who helped deploy this trap during Endurance 16.

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OSU greetings

Sediment trap team leader Jennifer Fehrenbacher (Oregon State Univ.) takes a photograph of the sediment trap signature that contains the names of her and Claudia Benitez-Nelson and Eric Tappa’s (Univ. South Carolina) team of foram ecology investigators.    

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Sediment trap signatures

During Endurance 16, the R/V Sikuliaq went out to the OOI Regional Cabled Array Slope Base site to turn a sediment trap as part of Jenn Fehrenbacher’s (Oregon State Univ.) and Claudia Benitez-Nelson and Eric Tappa’s (Univ. South Carolina) foram ecology investigation. It’s a tradition for folks to sign the traps as they are put…

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Port day

The Endurance 16 team deploys enough equipment on the Endurance mooring cruises that they have a port stop to unload the gear deployed on leg 1 and load the leg 2 gear.  It goes pretty fast.  Within 24 hrs, the team has the leg 1 gear unloaded and the leg 2 gear loaded and tested. …

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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. …

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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.

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