Antarctic Expedition Recovers Ecological Buoy, Providing Marine Data

China's 41st Antarctic Expedition Team Recovers Ecological Subsurface Mooring Buoy

China's 41st Antarctic expedition team has successfully retrieved the country's first ecological subsurface mooring buoy, deployed in the Amundsen Sea in early 2024. This recovery marks a significant milestone for China's Antarctic research, as the buoy is expected to provide valuable data on the marine ecosystem.

Subsurface mooring buoys are essential tools for oceanic expeditions. Equipped with high-precision sensors, they monitor seasonal and interannual variations in the marine ecosystem over extended periods. Retrieving the buoy after a year of seabed observation was a major task for the expedition team.

The buoy, deployed by the research icebreaker Xuelong 2 during the 40th Antarctic expedition, spans over 2.9 kilometers in length. It features a polar bio-acoustic detection module, a bio-optical detection module, and a basic marine environmental monitoring module. Its primary challenge is collecting data from the upper ocean beneath persistent sea ice cover, focusing on long-term observations of water layers between 0 and 400 meters.

The recovery process involved locating the buoy using an underwater acoustic probe and communicating with its release instrument. Despite being the most challenging recovery operation due to the buoy's length and complexity, the team successfully retrieved it from its original deployment location.

The data collected by the buoy will be analyzed to assess its system stability and data quality. This information will be used to refine future models, providing a more reliable technological foundation for continued Antarctic marine ecosystem research.