Revelle: Mooring’s Back!

Most research cruises leave their moorings in the water for months or years, but not these guys. They’re recovering a mooring they just deployed seven days ago. After it’s back on deck, they’ll pull off the data and will re-release it again in a few days. All in the name of science! The instruments on this mooring have been gathering … Read More

Revelle: A Mooring Milestone

We hit a huge milestone on Monday: we dropped mooring number 15, the last of our planned long-term moorings, as the sun set over the Tasmanian Landscape. All of the ingredients of the moorings—40 oversized spools of cable, 15 giant orange buoys, 50 thousand pounds of anchors, clusters of spherical glass balls enclosed in oversized yellow “hard hats,” and hundreds … Read More

Revelle: More Moorings, Sun and Some Fish

We took advantage of a sunny, temperate weather window on Sunday to deploy moorings T1 and T3. We loaded each of the moorings with 36 temperature sensors, which spanned half a kilometer of line, and three CTD’s, instruments that use a band of sensors to measure the water’s conductivity, temperature and density. For each of the moorings we’ve deployed so … Read More

Revelle: What is a mooring?

The focus of our cruise so far has been on deploying moorings, the backbone of this data-collecting mission. At their simplest, moorings keep boats, ships or buoys anchored to a single spot. The moorings we are using here, called subsurface moorings, are anchoring long, vertical stretches of line, sometimes several miles long, to the ocean floor. The top end of … Read More

Revelle: We are off!

After an exciting four days loading up the Revelle, we left the dock at 4pm on Friday and steamed for about 24 hours into the Tasman Sea. We have been lucky to have fair weather conditions as everyone finished preparing instruments for the first mooring. Watch the video to learn more. —Julia Calderone, The Revelle The Tasman Tidal Dissipation Experiment … Read More

Revelle: We’re eight hours from launch!

As we begin our final day of preparations, here are a few images from the last few days of planning and unloading. The Revelle leaves at 4pm from MacQuarie Wharf #4 today! — Julia Calderone, The Revelle The Tasman Tidal Dissipation Experiment // Supported by the National Science Foundation