Sampling offshore Bermuda this July, the BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) program completed its first full year of study to learn how marine microbes produce, transform, and leave behind dissolved organic matter as the seasons progress, and microbial communities wax and wane.

Not long after sunrise on July 24, a BIOS-operated ocean glider named Jack climbed slowly from a depth of nearly a half-mile offshore Bermuda toward the sea surface as it’s sensors collected and measured ocean properties, including temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll, and currents. It was a routine operation for Jack, an airplane-shaped vehicle that has traveled a similar path thousands of times over the past two years for BIOS researchers in the Sargasso Sea.

After a year of shark attacks, leaking instruments, and a hiatus resulting from the global COVID-19 pandemic, BIOS’s gliders are back to work in the waters offshore Bermuda.

BIOS’s newest gliders made their research debut in late September when they slipped into waters near St. David’s Head and headed to a predetermined destination 50 miles offshore Bermuda. For the next nine months, the duo known as Jack and Minnie will use their payload of scientific sensors to record daily changes in water chemistry and currents, as the summer cap of warm surface waters is mixed and replaced with cooler, nutrient-rich waters from below, and tiny microbes and phytoplankton respond to the changing conditions.

Two new underwater gliders arrived at BIOS in mid July and are expected to be gathering data in the waters around Bermuda by the end of the summer. The gliders, each resembling a 6-foot-long airplane, operate on battery power at sea with direction from land-based researchers while carrying a payload of sensors that measure ocean properties such as salinity, temperature, oxygen, nutrients, and currents.

Within the contours of oceanographic data are the stories of great ocean currents, tiny plankton, and life-sustaining nutrients at the surface of the sea.  University students learn to study ocean properties through plots and graphs of these data, but rarely do they get hands-on experience with the instruments that generated them. A new BIOS summer course aims to change that by introducing students to the methods and technologies that have become the bread and butter of modern oceanography.

Three days before Hurricane Gonzalo hit Bermuda in October, BIOS researchers launched their new glider Anna directly into the storm’s path for a rare look at hurricane dynamics below the sea surface.

Come out for a fascinating evening to get inside the development and passage of Hurricane Gonzalo and its atmospheric effects on Bermuda. Get a deeper look at the impact of the storm on the surrounding ocean as seen by the BIOS glider system deployed in the path of the hurricane.

Just 50 miles (80 kilometers) offshore of Bermuda, an unusual meeting took place this fall—not of people, but of three underwater robotic vehicles called gliders. Two of the gliders are owned and operated by BIOS as part of the Mid-Atlantic Glider Initiative and Collaboration (MAGIC) program. These vehicles, named Anna and Minnie, are equipped with a variety of sensors that measure ocean properties including pressure, temperature, salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll, and nutrients. The gliders have been diving and climbing from between the sea surface and depths near 2,500 feet (900 meters), while tracing a bow-tie-shaped route continuously surveying a 12-square-mile (20-square-kilometer) patch of ocean for the last six months.