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Steady As It Goes

Jim Ryder of the WHOI Mooring Operations and Engineering Group (left) steadies the line of a wire-following profiler, part of a Global Array mooring aboard the research vessel Nathaniel B. Palmer at a remote ocean site off the coast of Argentina. The yellow enclosure houses a suite of instruments and transits up and down a mooring riser in the ocean to collect continuous, high-resolution measurements. The Global Arrays are part of the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative—a system of long-term ocean arrays that gather data around the clock and relay them ashore in near real time to scientists, educators, and the public. (Photo courtesy of Sheri White, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)