A giant orange disc settled into the waters off Rongcheng in eastern China’s Shandong province, marking the deployment of what Chinese researchers describe as the world’s first-of-a-kind intelligent ocean-observation buoy.

It abandons a mooring architecture that has dominated Western marine engineering since World War II.

The six-metre-wide (19.7 feet) platform has completed sea trials and officially joined the Yellow Sea observation network, enabling continuous, real-time monitoring across the entire water column, according to the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“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 six-metre 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.