Eastern boundary completed

I'll start this post by apologising for the lack of updates for the last week but we have been very busy. Our moorings running down the continental slope from Africa have now been recovered and the replacements redeployed. So the first third of the cruise can be considered complete.

The scientific party and technicians have been working hard to organise all the instruments and mooring hardware required for the replacement moorings. They have also been downloading and completing initial processing on the data from the recovered instruments. These data will feed into our overall calculations of what the AMOC has been doing for the last 18 months since we last serviced the array.

The start of a mooring deployment - cranes and winches in operation with glass buoyancy (in orange plastic hard hats)  readied on deck


There are a number of new instruments being added to the array this year as part of a new project, but we shall cover these in more detail in another post.

We now have a 3 day transit to our next mooring location on the mid-Atlantic ridge where the bathymetry is much more complex and flat areas for landing moorings much harder to come by. Luckily for us these sites have been well surveyed on previous cruises so we know where the flat spots are.

From now on we will aim to update the blog at least whenever we have transit days.