A thick fog blanketed Woods Hole on the morning of Saturday, June 1st as my husband David and I drove to WHOI to meet eight students riding down from the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown. I was reminiscing about where I was this time last year—on a plane heading for Iceland for a […]
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After pulling into Reykjavik, Iceland on June 24, formally bringing to a close our research cruise to the Irminger Sea, I had a chance to do some touring around the city and nearby natural wonders with shipmates Heather, Hilary and Alison. We rented a car for the day, and our first stop was a national […]
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As a little kid, I was always fond of the song that went with the Disney attraction, “It’s a Small World After All.” I remember having a 45 rpm record of the song, which I would play over and over. I’m guessing that I saw the attraction at its debut at the 1964 New York […]
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For the past several days, the focus of activity on board the Neil Armstrong has been on the OSNAP project. OSNAP stands for Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic Program, and is an international effort to measure all the currents moving northward across 60N latitude, as well as the heat those currents carry. As described […]
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I find it so interesting that the object of my research is mostly invisible. No one, sighted or not, can “see” ocean currents below the surface. In the same way, no one can “see” the wind—we can see and hear the effects of wind—blowing leaves, horizontal snow, rattling windows. But the human eye can’t actually […]
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We are a week into this cruise now, and the weather has still been amazingly cooperative. Every now and then, the winds pipe up to around 20 knots (short for nautical miles per hour—mariners and fliers measure distance in nautical miles while landlubbers use statute miles—the nautical mile is about 15% longer than a statute […]
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This research cruise is dedicated to four different projects, of which ours is just one. The primary activity is the annual replacement of the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) moorings in the Irminger Sea, which is located east of Greenland. The Irminger Sea Array is part of the much larger OOI project with long-term observing sites […]
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A typical cabin on a research vessel looks mostly like a college dorm room—bunk beds, a desk, drawers and lockers for clothes, and that is about it. Most often, the two who share the cabin also share a bathroom (called a head in boat language) with two people from another cabin. Sometimes several cabins share […]
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Blind people who use a smart phone are likely taking advantage of one of the most important new technologies of the past couple of decades, that is, the Global Positioning System (GPS for short). What is the GPS anyway? The GPS is a large number of satellites orbiting the Earth that allow you to find […]
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In my last post, I described the main goal of our upcoming research cruise on the R/V Armstrong, that is, to set up four deep-sea moorings in the ocean east of Greenland. These moorings will have sensors on them to measure the water temperature, salinity, and the speed and direction of the currents. They will […]
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About Amy Bower
Amy Bower is a physical oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She has been chasing ocean currents in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for over 25 years, primarily by releasing acoustically tracked floats far below the sea surface. Legally blind since her mid-20s, Amy uses adaptive technology to continue her research. Her latest project, Overturning in the Subpolar North Atlantic, kicks off this summer with a series of research cruises to Iceland.