Breaking the Surface

A humpback whale surfaces in the icy water off Antarctica, near the U.S. icebreaker Lawrence M. Gould (left). Tyler Rohr, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography, snapped this photo on a research cruise to the Palmer Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, one of 28 such sites worldwide. Funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the LTER program supports long-term research on ecosystems that are important for the environment and for society. The NSF recently selected a new marine LTER off the Northeast U.S. Coast, led by WHOI biologist Heidi Sosik. (Photo by Tyler Rohr, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)