What is a deep sea oceanographic mooring deployment? & a few other bits and bobs from the DY120 cruise
The internet connection on the Discovery was intermittent, so here are a few blogs that I wrote whilst onboard and also from a few friends about their perspective about what we got up to. I wanted to begin by explaining what a mooring is, as that is a large part of the OSNAP science program that we were on board to help with. In the last blog, Sam explained why we were bobbing around the Atlantic and explained what a mooring is, I want to explain how we recover and deploy one of these moorings. This incredible photo of Pilot whales dancing through the waves was taken by Lewis Drysdale. We went from Southampton up and across to the from east to west along the line of moorings, as we went along we did a CTD (see two blogs previous), then a mooring recovery and deployment with a few ARGO floats dropped in along the way. A mooring is, as Sam Jo nes explains, " Each mooring consists of tens of instruments distributed along a wire, which is anchored to the seabed and kept vertical...