Ocean equipment resurfaces after five years lost
THE sea has delivered a belated Christmas present to North East researchers investigating ocean currents.
After going missing on Christmas Day five years ago, deep ocean-measuring equipment belonging to the UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC) has been found on a beach in Tasmania - 14,000 km away from where it was last seen.
Deployed in 2011 as part of an expedition led by Dr Miguel Morales Maqueda, then a research officer at NOC and now a senior lecturer in oceanography at Newcastle University, the deep-sea lander was dropped in the northern Drake Passage, a narrow section of the ocean between South America and Antarctica.
Gathering information on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the largest ocean current in the world, the instrument was due to spend two years collecting data at a depth of 1,100 metres, before being recovered on Christmas Day in 2013 by a research expedition on the Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross.
However, it did not return to the surface as planned for reasons that remain unclear.
After being presumed lost, the deep ocean instrument frame has now been discovered washed up on a beach on the western tip of Tasmania; it was identified as the missing lander by its serial numbers on two of the sensors.
“It’s amazing that it’s turned up after all this time,” said Dr Maqueda, who led the Antarctic Circumpolar Current The research equipment and a map showing Drake Passage and Tasmania
research project for 10 years. “Deep sea exploration is a risky business and there’s always a chance the equipment will be lost or stop working, so to find this now – and with some of the data still intact – is really exciting.
The data sensors have now been taken to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, where a team has managed to recover some of the information.
It is hoped that a scientific analysis of the recovered data will soon provide further insights into its remarkable journey.
This deep ocean platform was developed to measure sea level by means of precision pressure sensors, as well as monitoring salinity and temperature.
Professor Ed Hill, executive director of the NOC, said: “The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is key to understanding the dynamics of the global ocean, so these sustained observations are incredibly important.
“There is no better place to make these observations than the narrow Drake Passage, which is why this instrument was deployed there before it made its epic journey to Tasmania.”
The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is three times bigger than the Gulf Stream it circulates around the whole of Antarctica, keeping warm ocean waters away. This allows the Antarctic continent to maintain its huge ice sheet.
Dr Maqueda said: “The Newcastle and NOC scientists and engineers involved in this project are very grateful to the person who made the discovery of the stranded frame, a local who wishes to remain anonymous, and his brave team of volunteers that recovered the equipment.”