Post 9: Summer 2026 Release
By Margaret Gregory, MIT-WHOI Joint Program
Our fourth and final deployment of the 2025 O-STEAM drifters occurred on Monday (7/20/26)! A huge thank you to the crew of the RV Tioga for deploying the drifters for us this week and over the past year!
We started this series of deployments last fall with eight drifters built by the 2025 O-STEAM fellows. Our plan was to recover as many of them as possible and reuse them for the following seasonal deployments. Well, here we are at our final deployment (summer), and we have just two O-STEAM drifters remaining. The other six that were deployed (or redeployed) in October, February, and May are still out at sea. We stopped tracking them in June, and, to our knowledge, they have yet to wash ashore. We still have hope that we will receive calls from beachwalkers or fishermen who might eventually come across them in the upcoming months. Check out this map if you are interested in where each of the drifters was last spotted. I am very impressed that one of the drifters survived the trip all the way to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Drifters
This time, we deployed the Sophia (#2) and Annie/Autumn (#3) drifters! Previously, the Sophia drifter was deployed in October and landed near South Duxbury, while the Annie/Autumn drifter was deployed in February and beached along the Outer Cape. The Sophia drifter was a little beat up from the winter but is ready to go now with a new set of spars!
With just two O-STEAM drifters, we needed a third to be able to continue with three standard deployment locations. That’s where our red-sailed drifter, named Margaret (#1), comes in. We assembled the Margaret drifter from an extra drifter provided by Irina Rypina and a GPS transmitter that Grace Simpkins had from a past study. This drifter is a slightly different design than the O-STEAM drifters. Instead of one buoy around the main mast, it has four buoys attached by rope to the outer corner of each sail, making it a little sturdier and less likely to tilt out of the water when encountering large waves in choppy seas.
Preparing for Deployment
As mentioned above, the crew aboard the RV Tioga released the three drifters at the same locations selected for the winter and spring deployments. For more information about how these locations were chosen, see our second and fifth blog posts.
During our preparation for this release, Grace and I were joined by Heather Swails-McCarron, a reporter from the Cape Cod Times. After interviewing us about O-STEAM and the drifter project, she accompanied us to the WHOI dock to observe some last minute drifter assembly and repairs. The growing interest in our work is very exciting. If you have access to the newspaper, look out for Heather’s article next month!
Deployment
I can’t wait to see where our last batch of drifters go! Check out this map to track them live. Since these trajectories are the last pieces of data needed to complete our year-long experiment, the results of this release are particularly of interest. Among the questions we have are:
- Do the drifter tracks support the seasonality in transport out of Cape Cod Bay seen in our previous numerical experiments?
- When do the real drifter tracks differ from our predictions and why?
Hopefully we will soon be able to answer these questions and more!
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