What Floats Your Boat?
HiAOOS was joined on board KV Svalbard during its summer 2024 field campaign by the colourful initiative, Float Your Boat, an outreach project of the International Arctic Buoy Programme. The project aims engage the public and share knowledge about the Arctic Ocean circulation and sea ice.
Float Your Boat works with students who decorate small wooden boats that are then launched into the ocean to float naturally, teaching students about ocean circulation and currents in the process. The students can track their own wooden boat and follow its drifts across the Arctic.
Float Your Boat contributed 350 wooden boats to the campaign, most of which had already been decorated by young pupils from various primary and art schools in the US. The campaign team (crew, recruits and Masters students) had fun on board decorating the remaining boats, and making a few new ones, and even organised a competition for the best wooden boat.
Three separate deployments were carried out during the expedition. During the first part of the field campaign, one surface buoy measuring temperature and ice melting was deployed on an ice floe in the eastern part of the Amundsen Basin. Here the first group of small wooden boats and drifters were deployed . The second deployment took place near the North Pole. The proximity to the top of the world inspired the design of a compass pointing to the south in all directions. The ice drifter buoy was signed by the scientists, crew members and recruits aboard the KV Svalbard. The third and final deployment occurred as we returned southwards to retrieve our previously deployed weather station and ice buoy.
Float Your Boat also supplies scientists with ice drifter buoys that measure and transmit real-time sea level pressure, surface temperature and position data. The sea ice drift can be inferred from the GPS positions over time. These are key parameters in understanding more about the circulation and sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and how it is changing.
You can find out more about Float Your Boat and more information about their adventures with HiAOOS here.
See other reports from HiAOOS 2024 campaign:
