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The Good Fight

WHOI engineer Larry George keeps the top of an expendable spar buoy (X-Spar) away from the side of the ship during a test deployment this summer. The X-Spar is a low-cost platform that holds instruments to measure the interchange between the atmosphere and upper ocean in remote, inhospitable regions of the ocean where bottom-anchored moorings and buoys are not feasible. The air-sea exchange of heat, momentum, and gases are an important part of processes such as Earth’s carbon cycle and the global climate system.(Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)