Hey All,
So today in the Ocean Observatories course taught by Scott Glenn, Oscar Schofield and Josh Kohut, I proposed a question to the 70+ students in attendance: Where should we take Silbo and Challenger as we work our way across the Atlantic Basin?
Originally, our plan was to take the two gliders and create an X across the Atlantic, taking both gliders from pole to pole as Silbo flew from Iceland to Antarctica, and Ru29 from South Africa to Svalbard. But now, we have altered Silbo’s path to fly towards Barbados as we were making little to no progress as we tried to fight our way to Brazil. No knowing of the difficulties to get south, we began to reanalyze where we want to go with these gliders.
If we fly the gyre, it would follow the path shown above, continuing across the Atlantic towards Barbados, then north towards Rutgers and TWR, then west to Ireland and finally onwards north to Svalbard.
If we take this path, Challengers path will also become altered, restricting us to the South Atlantic Gyre:
The will then consist of our current flight across to Brazil, then flying south the Falkland Islands, across the Drake to Palmer Station, and then following the Antarctic Circumpolar Current either back to South Africa, or possibly push out limits and try for western Australia.
After proposing these paths to the class, all but one student said we should fly the gyres. The one that stood up to say we should follow the original path of the X followed up his suggestion with the argument that it would interesting to compare the data from the two gliders in an attempt to look for changes in the water column.
These discussions will have quite a lot of follow up in the weeks to come.
Force Wind Sea & Honor