In May, the Endurance team recovered the rest of the components of the broken mooring. Over the summer, they will examine the evidence to pinpoint the cause of the failure. The buoy will be reconditioned and sent back to its post. It’s all part of the dance that oceanographers do to unlock the secrets of the sea.
For more than half a century, oceanographers have ventured out of Newport to measure, probe and monitor the Pacific Ocean off the central Oregon Coast. And since the 1950s, these seafaring researchers have recorded about 4,000 “profiles” of the near-shore waters — surface to bottom measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels that begin to tell us how the world’s largest ocean influences everything from our weather to fisheries.