Welcome to the blog of expedition JC192 of the Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook. Over the next five weeks we will be posting about life and work on board. Today we are alongside in Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife. Almost everything is ready and tomorrow we set sail on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean that will end in Florida in April. On the way we will be collecting data for the RAPID 26°N project that measures the overturning circulation of the Atlantic.
I entered the field of oceanography in order to spend more time doing science whilst out at sea so I’m always looking for my next ocean adventure. Therefore, I was delighted to be asked to help with oxygen analysis on the RAPID cruise, which services the 15 moorings and landers that make up the RAPID array, measuring the Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC). The main reason I love going on research cruises is that the one thing they have in common is that whilst the science is underway there’s very rarely a dull moment. The RAPID cruise has quite a varied schedule but a typical day often unfolded as below. Although RAPID is a mooring cruise, a couple of days started relatively early in order to release an Argo float. Argo floats are free-drifting instruments that can take vertical profiles of temperature and salinity every 10 days for up to 10 years and beam their data straight to on online database ( http://www.argo.ucsd.edu/ ). There are currently ~3800 of these fl
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