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SCOPE Buoys Help Track Oil

A boat full of SCOPE drifters waits to release small, biodegradable buoys that will travel throughout the Gulf of Mexico and send GPS coordinates to researchers.
(Photo courtesy of CARTHE)

A boat full of SCOPE drifters waits to release small, biodegradable buoys that will travel throughout the Gulf of Mexico and send GPS coordinates to researchers. This is the second experiment by researchers from the Consortium for Advanced Research on Transport of Hydrocarbon in the Environment, or CARTHE, that deployed a large number of drifters to help learn more about where water goes in the Gulf. The first experiment used much larger, plastic drifters. Read more about the research in our CARTHE article.