In early January 2003, 92 subsurface isopycnal RAFOS floats were loaded on a truck for the start of a long voyage. The floats were delivered to Fort Pierce, Florida and loaded on the R/V Seward Johnson II at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. In March, Drs. Hebert and Rossby started on a month-long expedition from the Canary Islands to deploy these floats south of the Cape Verde Islands. The goal of this project, the Lagrangian Isopycnal Dispersion Experiment (LIDEX), funded by the National Science Foundation, is to determine the processes that mix the waters in the ocean horizontally (along constant density surfaces) and at what rate. When these scientists departed from the Canary Islands to deploy the floats, little did they know that one of their floats would eventually be returned by a fisherman.

Hebert, D., and T. Rossby. 2005. Ocean news: Oceanographic instrument returns after two years. Oceanography 18(2):8–10, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2005.61.

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