China’s new marine buoy says goodbye to classic Western design used since World War II

First-of-its-kind intelligent ocean-observation buoy with disc-shaped side anchor solves ‘tangling nightmare’ of traditional structures It abandons a mooring architecture that has dominated Western marine engineering since World War II. “The world’s first buoy system designed with a disc-shaped single-side anchor structure has broken through the traditional single-point mooring structure at the centre of disc-shaped buoys,” the institute wrote in a statement issued last month. The deployment also carried symbolic significance. As the new intelligent buoy entered operation, technicians simultaneously recovered a much smaller three-metre buoy that had served at the same station for more than 16 years. The project represents a rare attempt to redesign a buoy configuration that has remained largely unchanged for nearly 80 years. Traditional disc-shaped marine buoys – widely used in Western oceanographic systems since World War II – typically rely on a central single-point mooring structure.

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