A Buoy Goes to Sea

A brand-new surface mooring buoy is lifted by crane onto R/V Oceanus, on its way to a 2011 test deployment in the ocean south of Cape Cod. The prototype buoy is part of the WHOI-led Coastal and Global Scale Node component of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative, a program that will place networked instrumented platforms in the ocean to improve our understanding of the global ocean. Above the water line the buoy carries power-generating solar cells and wind turbines, meteorological instruments, and telemetry equipment.(Photo by Jayne Doucette, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)