Not an actual geographical designation, the “Oleander Line” refers to a route traveled by the container ship M/V Oleander in a highly dynamic and ecologically important area between Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Hamilton, Bermuda that crosses the Middle Atlantic Bight, Slope Sea, Gulf Stream and Sargasso Sea. While the Oleander’s route is part of its normal commercial travels, the ship became a key part of a project initiated in the 1970s to collect long-term data about the ocean’s currents, temperature, salinity, and carbon dioxide levels, among other measurements. Over time, the route became known as the “Oleander Line.”
The inspiration to put oceanographic sensors on a regularly sailing cargo ship stemmed from scientists’ realization that research ships alone could never hope to make the number and types of measurements needed to track changes of such a large region of the ocean playing out over time scales from days to decades. Read more about the specific equipment on the Oleander HERE.
The Oleander initiative currently includes the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), ASU BIOS (Arizona State University Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences), University of Rhode Island, Stony Brook University and NOAA, all of which are contributing to ocean observations and data collection, and offering peer-reviewed data. The project is a part of WHOI’s Science RoCs (Research on Commercial Ships) initiative, which aims to equip many more commercial vessels with sensors to measure physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the ocean along the world’s major shipping routes.
Early funding for The Oleander Project was provided by NOAA and the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Since 1999, The Oleander Project has been supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
“With an instrument in its hull to measure upper ocean currents, the ship crosses four major water masses of the North Atlantic: subtropical water in the Sargasso Sea, warm salty water carried from the tropics in the Gulf Stream, cold fresh waters from the Labrador Sea in the Slope Sea, and the waters on the continental shelf,” explained authors of a 2019 paper entitled “Oleander is More than a Flower: Twenty-Five Years of Oceanography Aboard a Merchant Vessel” that was published in the Oceanography Society journal. “A peek at the future illustrates how the new and newly equipped Oleander will be able to profile currents to greater depths and thereby contribute to monitoring the strength of the meridional overturning circulation.”
Read more about The Oleander Project HERE.
The WHOI assumed the management of the decades-long project in May 2023.
Over the history of The Oleander Project, two ships named Oleander made more than 1,000 crossings of the Gulf Stream and other currents in the Northwest Atlantic and gathered water velocity and ocean temperature data. The third and newest M/V Oleander came into service in 2019, and is now providing regular water column, sea surface, and atmospheric measurements.
To access the Oleander’s ASU BIOS data, click HERE.
- Header image courtesy of Oceanography (ISSN 1042-8275) published by The Oceanography Society, 1 Research Court, Suite 450, Rockville, MD 20850 USA. Oceanography articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
