CAMBRIDGE -- It was an incredible journey, no question about it.
A one-ton buoy, dragging more than its own weight in chains and anchors, was ripped from its mooring by ice in the Chesapeake Bay into southward-moving currents. Eleven days later, the electronic-laden buoy was found to have drifted 22 miles up the bay from its original position and into the Choptank River, two miles from the laboratory that monitors it.
"We'll never know the whole story," says Carole Moore, senior faculty research assistant at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental and Estuarine Studies.
Quite an admission from a scientist, one of those data-collecting folks who tell us there are no mysteries, just things we don't know yet.
But the journey of the buoy, part of the Chesapeake Bay Observing System (CBOS) that Ms. Moore helps monitor, has her and others shaking their heads in wonder.
The yellow buoy, which is about 18 feet tall, carries lights, antennae, solar panels, electronic equipment, gauges and and 600 pounds of ballast to help it provide information about wind and water in the Chesapeake Bay. The buoys are monitored by the CBOS, a federal-academic cooperative program that studies the bay.
The buoy's information is what scientists call "real-time." It is transmitted every 30 minutes to a receiving tower at Horn Point on the Choptank, which in turn sends it to a computer. From there, the bay's conditions go onto the Internet computer network within seconds of the original transmission by the buoy.
The information provides the CBOS and computer users with an instant snapshot of the Chesapeake through details of wind velocity, water salinity and temperature, currents, oxygen and tides.
Under normal conditions, two buoys are stationed in the bay -- one at the north end, one in the middle by James Island. A third buoy will go into the water this year at the bay's mouth, near the Potomac River.
Until Feb. 3, the midbay buoy was quietly doing its job near James Island. Then the second severe storm of the winter hit, and ice formed on the bay.
"We lost communication with it Feb. 3," Ms. Moore says. The same weather that silenced the buoy kept laboratory personnel from going out to check on it.
Ms. Moore, animatedly theorizing on how the buoy might have broken loose and made its journey, says:
"It's getting snowed on; the ice is building. The ice keeps getting higher and higher then the storms come up from the south. It must have been a flood tide, and the wind was from the south."
