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Chain comes home

The Asterias (foreground) welcomes the Chain home from a 20-month, around-the-world cruise in 1970-71 that took investigators to the North and South Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Somali Current, the Red Sea, the Java Sea, across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, into the Caribbean, and back home to Woods Hole. Chain made a total of 129 scientific cruises and traveled some 600,000 miles on nearly every type of ocean science. Long a favorite for her seaworthiness, Chain‘s last cruise ended in December 1975. In June 1979 the vessel was towed away for scrap.(Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)