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Lost and Found

In 2001, WHOI scientist Robert Beardsley (far right) and engineers, Sub-Surface Mooring Operations Group head Scott Worrilow (steadying float), Ryan Schrawder (blue hardhat) and Jim Ryder (blue jacket), placed six moorings off Antarctica to study currents in the remote Southern Ocean. They went back after a year to recover the moorings and their collected data, but found only five. This April, the lost mooring surfaced after 10 years. After a string of coincidences including mistaken identity, a ship in the same region, and some of the same people involved, the “ghost mooring” was recovered, with the data astonishingly intact. (Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)