FLIP – The world’s strangest ship that can flip up and down

The US Office of Naval Research owns a very strange oceanographic device. It is called the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), built and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California. FLIP is not a ship, although researchers can live and work on it for weeks at a time while they conduct scientific research on the vast ocean. It is actually a giant specialized buoy. The most unusual thing about this ship is that it has the ability to flip up and down.

FLIP is 355 feet (108 meters) long with small tanks at the front and a long empty tank at the end. When the tanks are filled with air, FLIP floats in a horizontal position. But when they are filled with seawater, FLIP sinks 300 feet into the water and the lighter end stands up. When it capsizes, the ship stands up because water is drawn from the depths under the influence of waves on the surface of the water, so FLIP is a stable device that is not affected by the waves. At the end of a mission, compressed air is pumped into the tanks to replace the water and the ship returns to a horizontal position so that it can be towed to a new position.

During a capsize, people stand on the outer deck. When FLIP capsizes, the deck becomes the bulkhead and the bulkhead becomes the deck. Most rooms on FLIP have two doors; one for use when it is horizontal, the other for use when it is upright. Some furniture on FLIP is installed so that it can rotate to a new position when the ship capsizes. Other equipment had to be unbolted and moved. Some, like the kitchen table and the bathroom sink, were mounted in pairs so that one would always be in place. The entire flip took twenty-eight minutes. When FLIP was upright, it was more than five stories above the water.

FLIP was created fifty years ago, in 1962, by two Scripps scientists, Dr. Fred Fisher and Dr. Fred Spiess, because they needed a quieter, more stable place than a research vessel to study how sound waves behave underwater. Conventional vessels are unstable because they are rocked up and down and side to side by the waves.

FLIP was designed to study wave height, sound signatures, water temperature and density, and to collect meteorological data. To avoid the possibility of interference from noisy equipment, FLIP has no engines or other propulsion devices. It must be towed across the water to a place where it can float freely or be anchored. When FLIP is upright, it is extremely stable and quiet.

Since Dr. Fisher and Spiess completed their initial tests, many other important data have been collected using FLIP. How water circulates, how ocean storms form, how seismic waves travel, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the underwater sounds made by marine animals are just a few of the subjects of research conducted using this amazing vessel.

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