19 February 2018
It is -4°C degrees outside and our third day of intensive oceanographic work continues. The cloud has descended around us again so we can’t see the coastline, and it has started to snow.
We asked Aitana Forcén-Vázquez from MetOcean/University of Auckland to explain to us what a mooring is and what it does: basically a mooring is a rope anchored to the ocean floor. Along this rope, there are different instruments that measure different variables depending on what processes we want to capture. For example, we can measure temperature, salinity and currents at different depths. The moorings will stay in the ocean recording data for 11 months until next year when they will be picked up. Two moorings were successfully deployed this morning in our Cape Adare transect and another is planned for tomorrow. The instrumentation on these moorings has been designed to measure the near-bottom flow of deep water and other water properties at different depths through the water column at two points along the slope and on the continental shelf.
