New Research Ship Sally Ride Sails for Home
R/V Sally Ride (Photo: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego)
On August 26, 2016, R/V Sally Ride will arrive from its shipyard birthplace in Anacortes, Wash., via a stop in San Francisco, to its home port at the Scripps Nimitz Marine Facility in Point Loma. The ship is owned by the U.S. Navy and operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego—one of the world’s most renowned ocean, atmosphere, and earth system research centers.
R/V Sally Ride is one of the world’s most technologically advanced oceanographic research vessels and will put that technology to work in missions throughout the northern Pacific Ocean. With it, seagoing scientists will work toward goals of fundamental importance to society: preserving the fisheries that are vital to the world’s food supply, discovering new chemical compounds that are the basis for antibiotics and cancer therapies, avoiding the large-scale instability in natural systems that is a consequence of climate change, and filling in the jigsaw puzzle of global tectonics that lets us understand the risk of seismic events where we live.
The ship is one of three University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) vessels operated by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. As with 18 other vessels in the UNOLS fleet, it is available for use by oceanographers, geoscientists, biologists, and atmospheric scientists around the country.
R/V Sally Ride will provide “environmental intelligence”—knowledge to aid the planet and its inhabitants in a time of environmental crisis. A better understanding of the ocean is essential for safe, effective U.S. naval operations, and for global economic and environmental well-being.
New concepts about our home planet will emerge from research done on R/V Sally Ride and become the solutions that UC San Diego’s living laboratory exports to the rest of the world.
For instance, in its first scheduled research cruise in November 2016, R/V Sally Ride will travel along the transect of the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI). This classic survey of the California Current has taken place for more than 60 years. CalCOFI documents the interplay between the marine life vital to the West Coast economy with its environment and the ocean dynamics set into motion by human activities. Now the program is attempting to create forecasts not just of cyclical climate phenomena but of the changes in marine life that are associated with those phenomena, creating a tool of immense value to commercial fishing operations, regulators, and the myriad other industries that are dependent on seafood production.
February 2024
