Feature
The Great South Channel
When people are hungry, they go to a place where they know they can find their favorite food. Right whales do much the same thing. In the Great South Channel,…
Read MoreTracking Toxic Chemicals in Oil Spills
I don’t do San Francisco like most people. I skip the cable cars, Lombard Street, Alcatraz, and the fine restaurants and museums. Soon after my flight arrives, I drive my…
Read MoreOn the Trail of Mercury in the Ocean
I returned from Hawai’i in mid-December with 700 bottles of seawater. The bottles hold what I hope are solutions to an abiding mystery. In the middle of the ocean, waters…
Read MorePowerful Currents in Deep-Sea Gorges
On my first major research cruise, the ship was hit by a hurricane. On the second, the weather was even worse. In one particularly nasty storm, I remember standing braced…
Read MoreScientists Solve a Deepwater Horizon Mystery
Right after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded April 20, 2010, marine scientist Monty Graham from the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama began exploring Gulf of Mexico waters to…
Read MoreClues in Shark Vertebrae Reveal Where They’ve Been
It’s 1963. The escalating arms race and the horrific power of nuclear bombs cause world leaders to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting weapons testing in the atmosphere and…
Read MoreWhale Heads and Tales
It’s a Saturday morning at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown, Mass., the farthest point on the Cape. I am sleepy, hungry, and slightly dehydrated, but we are on a schedule…
Read MoreSearching for Life on the Seafloor
Smaller than a fingernail, like bits of downy red feathers, baby tubeworms cling to a vertical wall towering alongside the submersible Alvin 2,500 meters beneath the sea in 2006. Repaved…
Read MoreThe Scientist Who Stays Out in the Cold
The Latest Fashion in Bowhead Whale Songs
Whales, it turns out, are dedicated followers of fashion. There’s a style to the song they sing to attract mates, and that style shifts. To keep up with their very…
Read MoreTracking an Elusive Chemical: Estrogens
On a crisp October morning, our small boat bobbed gently 10 miles offshore. The sun glinted off the dark blue surface of Massachusetts Bay and directly below us, all of…
Read MoreThe Ocean’s Tiny Chemists
Once as I was flying cross-country over the middle of the United States, the woman in the seat next to me remarked: “You know, in Nebraska when there’s a game…
Read MoreAdieu to the Research Vessel Oceanus
Between the Beach and the Deep Blue Sea
Capt. Ken Houtler laughed when I remarked that I didn’t know the sun rose this early as I boarded his ship last summer. Now climbing aboard again in January, I…
Read MoreInto the Dark and Ice
A Drop in the Ocean is Teeming with Life
“The universe is made of stories …“ —Muriel Rukeyser There are countless stories in every drop of seawater. But with a cast of millions and more plotlines than a daytime…
Read MoreEvery Chromatogram Tells a Story
Where is this mountainous landscape? Actually, that’s the wrong question. It’s a landscape, all right, but it’s a chemical landscape: You’re looking at oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. Each…
Read MoreAt Deepwater Horizon, Basic Research Was Applied
“Basic research, directed simply toward more complete understanding of nature and its laws, embarks upon the unknown. Clearly, that which has never been known cannot be foretold, and herein lies…
Read MoreCape-Able Workers Build Deep-Sea Devices
In 2009 Rob Evans knew he had a laborious task coming. He needed to build 120complicated and delicate silver chloride electrodes for deep-sea instruments. He also wanted to change the…
Read MoreWhere Will We Get Our Seafood?
By 2030 or 2040, most seafood bought by Americans will be raised on a farm, not caught by fishermen. And, unless policies governing aquaculture in the United States change, the…
Read MoreResearch Road Trip
Audio slideshow: A three-day, 500-mile quest for tarballs
Read MorePsychotherapy for Plankton
The scene: A diatom is out of its oceanic habitat and on a couch, talking to a therapist. The diatom is stressed. It can’t ever seem to get enough nutrients.…
Read MoreUp From the Seafloor Came a Bubbling Brew
Eleven days after the explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig on April 20, 2010, representatives from BP called Andy Bowen at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). “It had become…
Read MoreShifting Sands and Bacteria on the Beach
Most coastal communities in the United States test the water at beaches for the presence of bacteria. But they don’t routinely test the sand. Does sand also harbor bacteria? Until…
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