Image

Measuring Salty Seas

March 3, 2017

WHOI senior engineering assistant Ben Pietro oversees a deployment of yellow “hardhats” on the R/V Revelle during a 2016 expedition to the eastern tropical Pacific, where some of the highest rainfall rates on the planet create a region of low salinity. The hardhats cover glass spheres and are used for flotation on moorings. The expedition was part of a multi-year project that began in 2012 called the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS) to understand how salt content fluctuates in the ocean’s upper layers and how those variations relate to changes in the global water cycle.(Photo by Carol Anne Clayson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)