Argo Float Deployment

    We have a special guest on our ship, who got on in Cape Town. His name is Greg Brusseau.. He will be with us until we arrive in Argentina. He works at the University of Washington in the School of Oceanography, and is deploying temperature-reading mechanisms and Argo floats off of our ship periodically throughout our trek across the Atlantic. The data that will be collected will be sent to NOAA. The floats collect data on temperature and salinity.
    He deploys small temperature reading devices around every 70 minutes, because he needs to deploy them every 30 kilometers or so. The time fluctuates with the speed of the ship. Needless to say, he never gets more than an hour of sleep at a given time. The Argo floats are deployed further apart than the other devices. He is deploying around 16-18 of these throughout the voyage, compared to the over 230 for the smaller devices. The Argo floats are a bit over 6 feet tall and are highly specialized. They need to be in a cardboard box when they are deployed so that the antennae does not snap off. The cardboard box is tied together with a wax string and a lifesaver. Once the lifesaver disintegrates from the water, the box will open allowing the float to come out. The cardboard will disintegrate in the water within 48 hours. These floats go to a depth of 1000-2000 meters, and resurface every 10 days. A successful float will take readings for 5-7 years.

My marine biology course and earth's changing climate course scheduled time slots with Greg so that we could watch him deploy an Argo float. We watched him build the cardboard box and deploy it off the aft of the ship. Once it hit the water, an albatross landed next to the cardboard box to examine it; it was quite comical.