Today we recovered a mooring that has been gathering information about this site since September 2018. The mooring is equipped with a current meter that measures a vertical profile of bottom currents every 30 seconds. There is also a sediment trap eight meters above the seafloor used to capture sediment and organic material as it settles down through the water column (https://www.mbari.org/seafloor_expedition_2018/).

To recover the mooring, we sent an acoustic signal that activated a mechanical release at the base of the mooring and triggered the device to float to the surface. After recovering the instruments and downloading the data, we put a new collecting tube in the sediment trap and redeployed the mooring in the same location. In nine months, we will be back to recover the mooring. The current meter data and sediment trap samples continue to add pieces to the puzzle of what produces the morphologies we see on the seafloor.