The RV Kaharoa
motored out of Wellington, New Zealand on Saturday, loaded with more
than 100 scientific instruments, each eventually destined for a watery
grave. Crewmembers will spend the next two months dropping the 50-pound
devices, called Argo floats,
into the seas between New Zealand and Mauritius, off the coast of
Madagascar. There, the instruments will sink and drift, then measure
temperature, salinity and pressure as they resurface to beam the data to
a satellite. The battery-powered floats will repeat that process every
10 days — until they conk out, after four years or more, and become
ocean junk.
Under an international program begun in 2000, and that started producing useful global data in 2005, the world’s warming and acidifying seas
have been invisibly filled with thousands of these bobbing instruments.
They are gathering and transmitting data that’s providing scientists
with the clearest-ever pictures of the hitherto-unfathomed extent of
ocean warming. About 90 percent of global warming is ending up not on
land, but in the oceans.,,read morehttp://www.climatecentral.org/oceans
