Researchers recover a Wave Glider from the Pacific Ocean south of Cortes Bank during a cruise in November 2015 in this photo by LeRoy Dorman, professor emeritus at Scripps Oceanography.
Any equipment left in the ocean will develop a coating of microorganisms, plants, algae, or animals and this device was no exception. The wave glider had been deployed to hover above a seismic array set up at Deep Sea Drilling Project site 469 and relay seismic data from an ocean-bottom seismograph to a satellite, Dorman said. This allows use of seafloor seismic data in real-time,
rather than waiting to recover the instrument with the internally-recorded data.
Chief scientist for this cruise was Scripps graduate student Adrian Doran.
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