Final Week

We're into our final week of Disco's last dance. And what a final week it is! In comparison with the long steams that broke up the work earlier in the trip, we now have lots of moorings to do–all in close range of one another.

This week we are doing the Western Boundary moorings. These moorings that measure the Antilles Current and the Deep Western Boundary Current in the North Atlantic. These are arguably the most important moorings in the whole of the RAPID array.

Tuesday will be a very exciting day. We recover WB2 the keystone mooring in the array. That evening, we should be able to look at an updated timeseries of the Atlantic Overturning circulation. This will be the first update since April 2011 and promises to be very interesting. I, for one, am very excited.

The last update showed us some dramatic interannual variability. There is a nice synopsis of those results here.

Meanwhile, before heading off on this leg, we stopped in Nassau, Bahamas. We picked up a new crew and some new technicians. Some of the scientist managed to get on land for a bit. Here's the ubiquitous picture of Ben and Darren in the sea with one of our hard working technicians, Ian.

Ben, Ian and Darren enjoying themselves during our brief stop in Nassau last Friday

Nassau is primarily a port for cruise liners and we think that Discovery may have felt slightly out of place at the dock–can you spot Discovery in the picture below?

Spot the Discovery

Gerard