Assembly Line

Technicians Meghan Donohue (left) and Andrew Davies worked through a bitterly cold morning in February to assemble a new expendable spar (X-Spar) buoy conceived by WHOI scientists Carol Anne Clayson and John Toole. The buoy is designed to gather a variety of oceanographic and atmospheric data from remote and hostile locations. Places like the Southern Ocean are poorly studied compared to other locations on Earth because of its distance from major ports and the storms that regularly circle Antarctica. X-Spar should help to fill the gaps in data that scientists need to better understand the planet’s climate system. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)