New Buoys May Buoy Research

Ocean researchers hope the expanded U.S. tsunami warning system could offer new opportunities for basic science. A shortfall in ship support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is putting the squeeze on researchers. “The number of field programs at sea that NSF can actually support is going down,” says Lynne Talley, a physical oceanographer with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. But marine scientists might find room aboard ships being deployed for the tsunami initiative. Managers from various seafaring government agencies met this week at the headquarters of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to discuss plans for, among other things, expanding the number of wave-detection buoys in its Pacific tsunami warning system from six to 24, plus a handful more in the Atlantic and Caribbean ( Science , 21 January, p. [331][1]). “Any other science mission we can do while we're out there we'll try to accommodate,” a NOAA spokesperson says. Such missions could include bottom-mapping efforts and marine biology. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.307.5708.331