Station K8 – Recovery of a Mooring Array in Fog

By Anne-Sophie Fortin

This figure has four panels. (1) The mooring array is floating at the surface of the sea after we remotely detached it from its anchor. (2) Meteor changed its direction many times as we were looking for the mooring array. (3) We obtained the distance between us and the mooring array from an acoustic deck unit. (4) The crew recovering the mooring array with a winch.
(1) The moorings are floating at the surface of the sea after we remotely detached them from their anchor. (2) Meteor changed its direction many times as we were triangulating the position of the moorings. (3) We obtained the distance between us and the moorings from an acoustic deck unit. (4) The crew recovering the moorings with a winch.

August 15, 2022

To measure the ocean circulation, mooring arrays have been deployed since 2014 in the Labrador Sea as part of the OSNAP program (o-snap.org) and are serviced every two years by scientific expeditions like ours. Today we successfully recovered the K8 moorings and the measurements that it took over the past two years. But it was not so easy!

The weather was quite nice in the morning. As we were approaching station K8, we sent an acoustic signal to the K8 moorings so that it detaches itself from its anchor and starts floating at the surface. However, a few moments later, we entered a thick fog, which complicated the recovery. Despite the fog, we could guide ourselves to the array using the acoustic deck unit, which shows at which distance we are from the array. After a few hours of hunting in the fog, we finally got visual contact with the array. The crew then recovered the moorings with their winch, and we could start cleaning them, extracting the datasets, and the preparation to put them back to sea for another two years.

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