That’s nearly 2.5 miles down. Moorings can sometimes be used to secure a ship in one location, or they can be dropped down into the deep, and left there to collect data until you come back and take the instruments up and out of the water again. On this cruise, we will be deploying several moorings throughout the cruise that we will leave in place for the next 2 years, until the next expedition in 2015. Use your imagination with the diagram below (for the 3800 meter mooring; others will be deployed at different locations/depths). I know the words are too small to read, but here is what’s going on:
• Anchor (the bottom rectangle): Block of concrete or metal that will sit on the sea floor, and the only part that will remain when the mooring is taken out of the water.
• Release Assembly (the two yellow tubes nearest the anchor): Upon returning to take the mooring out of the water, scientists will use a transducer to send signals to the release assembly to unlatch from the anchor. The second tube is a backup, just in case.
• MMP – MacLane Moored Profiler (the big yellow rectangle): This will slowly go up and down between the two bumpers (small grey rectangles) located at depths of 54 and 754 meters, measuring the water’s conductivity (salt content), temperature, depth (pressure), and currents.
• ADCP – Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (silver tube with blue top): At about 53 feet down, this will detect motion, or currents, in the water.
• Location transponder (small yellow tube above ADCP): Scientists will use this piece of equipment, about 50m down, to help locate the mooring on the next expedition.
• Spheres (the big yellow balls near the top – but still 47-49m below the surface): These will act as a kind of floatation, keeping the mooring straight up and down.
The reason the top of the mooring is 50meters (over 160feet) below the surface is not to stay out of the way of ships. It’s to stay out of the way of ice! And here is one of the real things going into the water (this one was deployed at a depth of several hundred meters) in the Laptev Sea, at 77°N latitude and 124°E longitude.
Ms. Gilbert’s class: Lindsay how deep are the deepest waters over in the arctic? What type’s of instruments do you use in order to test something in the deep waters?
Dear Joseph, the deepest waters in the Arctic are over 4000meters deep. That’s over 2.5 miles! To measure the deep water, we send down a mooring (which is a fancy word for anchor) that goes all the way down to the bottom and has a cable that reaches almost to the surface. Along the cable are instruments that measure the water’s temperature, salinity, pressure, currents, and chemical composition. We also can send down other instruments on a cable that include bottles that can take samples of water at different depths, and bring them back to the surface t study. The length of those cables is pretty impressive isn’t it?
It sure is impressive how long those cables are
Hi Joseph, I totally agree, I can’t imagine a cable being 2.5 miles long!