UW Oceanographer Dropping Robotic Floats On Voyage To Antarctica

Jan. 12, 2017

A University of Washington oceanographer is chief scientist on a voyage in the waters around Antarctica as part of a major effort to monitor the Southern Ocean.

Stephen Riser(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), a UW professor of oceanography, embarked Dec. 24 as part of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling(Link is external) , or SOCCOM, project to collect better data about the planet’s most remote ocean.

The expedition is two thirds of the way through a month-long voyage from Punta Arenas in southern Chile to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Along the way, researchers are deploying robotic floats built at the UW(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) as part of the six-year, $21-million National Science Foundation effort. The multi-institutional project, based at Princeton University, will gather detailed observations of the Southern Ocean to understand its role in the global climate.

Source: http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/01/11/uw-oceanographer-dropping-robotic-flo…