Endurance 16
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 MorePutting 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 MoreGetting 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 MoreSediment trap mooring
This image shows nearly all the equipment that comprises a typical sediment trap mooring. Syntactic buoys (yellow balls on left and ready for deployment), railroad wheel anchors (at stern), two sediment traps (yellow cylinders on right), mooring wire already spooled on winch. Missing from the photo are the acoustic releases, which can be seen in…
Read MoreFriendly float
This float is part of the sediment trap deployment. Someone added a smiley face to let sealife know that we mean no harm.
Read MoreSediment Trap
This is a McLane Mark VII 13 cup Sediment Trap, which is used to collect a time-series of material falling through the water column. The stack of three railroad wheels (on right) are the anchor.
Read MoreAcoustic Releases
Two Teledyne/Benthos R12K Acoustic Releases are connected in tandem as they await deployment. The Acoustic Releases are deployed as part of the anchor assembly for the sediment trap mooring. The R12K releases can be deployed in up to 12,000 meters of water for up to four years on a standard battery pack.
Read MoreProfiler Moorings
The Coastal Endurance Array includes five profiler moorings deployed inshore, at the shelf, and offshore. These moorings take measurements up and down the water column. The inshore and shelf surface piercing profilers allows for the sampling of near surface phenomena as the profiler travels through the water then breaches the surface. Fine resolution sampling of…
Read MoreSurface Moorings
During the Coastal Endurance 16 expedition, the team will deploy and recover six surface moorings, one profiler moorings, and recover three gliders. The team will also be conducting missions with gliders to take oceanographic observations in the vicinity of the moorings. These observations serve to validate observations at the moored sites, as well as expand…
Read MoreWork Underway
The Coastal Endurance Array is complex, consisting of multiple components to gather ocean observations and send them to shore. Once the moorings and their instrumentation are recovered, it takes the Coastal Endurance Team about six months to take them all apart, clean, repair, refurbish, and replace, as necessary, to ensure when the moorings go back…
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