Notes from the Field

By Eric Lindstrom There are not many places in the open ocean that get their own special name as a “sea.” Most seas are what we call marginal seas – offshoots of the major ocean basins. The Sargasso Sea, as a vast track of the western subtropical North Atlantic Ocean is known, has a special […]

By Eric Lindstrom After several weeks of your following my postings from the field, I thought it would be good to tell you a little about myself. Maybe that will help explain the weird wanderings of the blog or the subject matters I choose to write about. Let’s start at the beginning: I grew up […]

By Eric Lindstrom From the shipboard perspective, all we really see of the sea is the surface. Of course we can see into the water a short way, right close to the ship, but not very far. The horizon is 360 degrees and the great dome of sky seems endless. Being that we are about […]

By Eric Lindstrom When we are doing work at sea, it hardly seems fair for NASA to hog the limelight. We are usually offering data from satellites, not ships, moorings, or gliders. There are partner agencies in the U.S. Government who make enormous contributions to the physical oceanography enterprise. In D.C., oceanographers know these agencies […]

By Eric Lindstrom SPURS Chief Scientist Ray Schmitt has been thinking about the salt in the ocean for a long time. He did his PhD thesis on an unusual form of mixing called “salt fingers,” which we will discuss in a later post. This small scale mixing process led him to consider the origins of […]

By Eric Lindstrom One of the things that we worry about on the ship, as part of our daily routine, is trash. Nothing goes over the side unless it is biodegradable. We have separate trash cans for plastics, foils, and other such material that would pollute the ocean. There are cans with paper liners for […]

By Eric Lindstrom The central mooring at the SPURS site is a critical piece of gear. It will provide us with a time series of upper ocean properties at one location over the entire year. We’ll build the other SPURS measurements around this spot on this and future voyages. We’ll “fly” the gliders in patterns […]

By Eric Lindstrom We just launched the first of our autonomous vehicles – a pink Seaglider with the sexy name of #189. Underwater gliders are the longest-range autonomous undersea vehicles in the oceans by virtue of their very simple propulsion mechanism: the translation of a vertical force into an horizontal one through use of wings. […]

By Eric Lindstrom “Why do sharks swim in saltwater? Because pepper water makes them sneeze!” Jokes aside, why is saltwater so important? Find out using our educational resources about ocean salinity. Along with our expedition, there are many web resources for educators wishing to incorporate oceanography and salinity into their curricula. This post highlights some […]