Our time in Woods Hole has drawn to a close. The friends we have made over the past few months wave farewell from the dock as we throw our lines and head for open ocean. The quaint little New England village that has become our temporary home fades into fog, and soon, we are surrounded by water in every direction. With fair winds and weather, it will take us three weeks to reach Montevideo. The forecast, so far, appears clear. I hope it holds.
With no science party on board, the ship feels spacious. Suddenly, we all have room to work on projects that there never seems to be time for: I fix the camera network issues we’ve been having, set up a computer system in the science office, work on moving the bridge switch to a place where tall people won’t hit it with their heads (shame on you, shipyard), and in general, get the ship ready for our upcoming month-and-a-half-long cruise.
Although no scientists are present, science goes on. Along our way South, and later, when the ship transits across the Southern Atlantic to South Africa, we will be deploying a few dozen ARGO floats. The ARGO program has been around since the 90s, with the aim of generating an ocean-wide profile of oceanographic characteristics. Although satellites may estimate ocean characteristics from space, they are only able to measure what’s going on at the surface, so until ARGO, what went on below remained a mystery (unless one rented a research vessel and cast a bunch of CTDs, which would be time consuming and expensive). Each ARGO is free floating, and uses an oil-filled bladder to regulate its buoyancy, thus conducting dozens of CTD profiles as it drifts through the ocean during its two-year lifetime. Currently, there are about 3,800 ARGO floats around the world, allowing for daily updates of ocean-wide profiles. Pretty cool if you ask me. To top it off, all of this data is available, for free, to the public.
The deployments are a breeze. We slow down the ship and lower the box that contains the ARGO down to the water. A hydrostatic lock hits the water and releases the bridle, and the ARGO drifts away in our wake. The water is calm calm calm. I wonder if tomorrow it will mirror the sky, just like it did last year, off the coast of Bermuda. The clouds are just as I remember, towering and well-defined, allowing for fantastic sunrises and sunsets. For the past few years, I have moved from one place to another, every few months or so. Turns out that this time last year, I was in the exact same place: on a ship, headed South from Bermuda, on my birthday morning. It feels good to be back.