And I thought we made a lot of @bgc-argo.bsky.social profiling floats!!!! We're going to have to work harder. @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social @soccomproject.bsky.social

🌊A busy day for @mbarinews.bsky.social science and @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social, the major US contribution to @bgc-argo.bsky.social.

BGC-Argo floats used to study marine heatwaves and oxygen deficient zones. Great work by Mariana Bif - University of Miami, former MBARI postdoc.

🌊BGC-Argo float of the month is a sensor, not a float. Bif and Johnson (GBC; doi/10.1029/2024GB008473) show that the concentration of nitrite can be extracted from the UV spectra of ISUS or SUNA nitrate sensors.

But more..

@globaloceanbgc.bsky.social floats. @mbarinews.bsky.social

🌊The Southern Ocean is warming, is productivity changing? New paper by Liniger et al. uses the nitrate sensors on 274 SOCCOM/BGC-Argo floats to compute annual NCP. It has increased significantly over the past two decades.
@mbarinews.bsky.social @soccomproject.bsky.social @bgc-argo.bsky.social‬

🌊 BGC-Argo float of the month. The 300th float of the GO-BGC project was launched in the S Atlantic. Funded by the US NSF, these floats provide essential observations of ocean metabolism - productivity, oxygen, pH... @bgc-argo.bsky.social‬ @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social #OneArgo #Argo

🌊Float of the Month. The BGC-Argo array in May 2025! With ships, it took decades to collect the data to visualize the chemistry and biology of the ocean interior. Now we can do it monthly, realtime, quality controlled. Access is easy with webODV. This is going to change things! #UNOC3 #OneArgo

🌊Float of the Month, 5906440 (@globaloceanbgc.bsky.social @bgc-argo.bsky.social). Drifting north for 4 years, it shows the evolution of the bio. response to ocean phys. At low latitudes, warm water does not mix deep enough (Mixed Layer Depth, black line on NO3 plot) to bring NO3 to the surface. 1/2

🌊MBARIs @mbarinews.bsky.social new research vessel, R/V David Packard, has left Vigo Spain to come home. Its first science mission, deploy @bgc-argo.bsky.social floats across the Atlantic and up the Pacific. First O2 float in for @argogermany.bsky.social. More for @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social

🌊🧪@bgc-argo.bsky.social Float of the Month. WMO 7900823 deployed nearly 80 south in the Ross Sea has done 2 years under ice. Here's the data plot (all data freely available @soccomproject.bsky.social). No bloom this year! Too much ice melt, no deep mixing, and no iron to feed plankton - IMO.

It’s 10 days into the new year & @globaloceanbgc.bsky.social & @soccomproject.bsky.social have already deployed 10 new @bgc-argo.bsky.social profiling floats. 410 in the water, 70 with chem & 332 have chem/bio sensors - O2, pH, NO3, & bio-optics. They sample the upper 2 km
every 10 days. 🌊⛴️🌡🧪

Happy Holidays from the SOCCOM (soccom.princeton.edu) and GO-BGC (go-bgc.org) projects. The present under the tree? 115 BGC-Argo profiling floats deployed this year and more at sea. All data freely available.

Thanks to all the folks who made this happen and the US NSF for their support.

This is the first in an occasional series on ‘older ocean science papers you should read’.

Ever wonder why cans no longer have Pb soldered seams? In 1980, Settle and Patterson used methods developed to measure Pb in seawater and measured lead in canned tuna. In Science (tinyurl.com/y4z83z8j), 1/4

Thank you Sonne. They are currently at sea on a Geotraces cruise in the Indian Ocean, Eric Achterberg Chief Sci. There are 7 GO-BGC (go-bgc.org) profiling floats on board and 3 already launched (7902123, -24, -25). We very much appreciate their help deploying floats.

🌊@BGC-Argo, @GO_BGC float of the month 4903026. This is the first BGC-Solo II float, developed @scrippsocean.bsky.social. Deployed off Monterey Bay, it has made 375 vertical profiles, most to 2000 m at 1 to 3 day intervals (>10 years at 10 d cycles). The upper 300 m of the record is shown.

🌊An awesome BGC-Argo paper in PNAS (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) that does a global census of phytoplankton carbon. They conclude "Our study demonstrates that profiling robots enable more reliable monitoring of Earth’s phytoplankton, which is urgently needed to understand the impact of climate change."

🌊

Interested in ocean chlorophyll? A new paper by Long et al. rdcu.be/dXcjY explores the relationship between chloro, measured by BGC-Argo floats and by ocean color satellites. The figure shows seasonal maps of Chl_flt/Chl_sat. Systematic variations in the ratio are likely due to effects of Fe.

@davidho.bsky.social @GO_BGC Glad to contribute. I used to do a "profiling float of the month" on that other app. Here's my first for Bluesky. Float WMO_5905380 is nearing its 8th year operating under seasonal ice in the Weddell Sea and just popped up, transmitting data from last winter.