Skip to content

Feature


Volunteer Gets an Oceanful of Experience

Volunteer Gets an Oceanful of Experience

<!– –> It’s two in the morning, and I’m watching a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, explore previously unseen areas of the seafloor off Indonesia. In real time, I watch…

Read More

How Does Toxic Mercury Get into Fish?

How Does Toxic Mercury Get into Fish?

Most everyone has heard by now that we should limit our consumption of certain fish because they accumulate high levels of toxic mercury. But nobody—not even scientists—knows how that toxic…

Read More

Tracking a Trail of Oil Droplets

Tracking a Trail of Oil Droplets

In the days after oil began gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well, scientists sought quick information on where the oil was traveling in the depths and how it might be…

Read More

A Titanic Tale

A Titanic Tale

<!– –> In June of 1985, news came that Bob Ballard aboard the research vessel Knorr had found the RMS Titanic. Almost immediately, the rumors started that an expedition from…

Read More

Plastic Particles Permeate the Atlantic

Plastic Particles Permeate the Atlantic

Recent reports of a “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the subtropical waters of the North Pacific Ocean described a floating island as large as Texas—so thick that one could potentially…

Read More

Salps Catch the Ocean’s Tiniest Organisms

Salps Catch the Ocean's Tiniest Organisms

Salps are sometimes called “the ocean’s vacuum cleaners.” The soft, barrel-shaped, transparent animals take in water at one end, filter out tiny plants and animals to eat with internal nets…

Read More

Alvin Gets an Interior Re-design

Alvin Gets an Interior Re-design

For more than four decades, scientists have foregone a few creature comforts to see animals, or volcanoes, or shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. On a typical dive in…

Read More

A ‘WHOI Way’ of Doing Things

A 'WHOI Way' of Doing Things

People who have worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution know it in their bones. People who work with WHOI feel it, too: There’s a WHOI culture, a WHOI way of…

Read More

A Torrent of Crabs Running to the Sea

A Torrent of Crabs Running to the Sea

Joanna Gyory’s Ph.D. plans changed completely when she saw the crabs. It was her third or fourth day at the Liquid Jungle Lab, a research facility on an undeveloped island…

Read More

Science in Service to the Nation

Science in Service to the Nation

In 1863, as the Civil War raged, Congress established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an honorary society of scholars that any government department could call upon to  “investigate, examine,…

Read More

The Call of the Sea

The Call of the Sea

Marshall Swartz’s lab is a Santa’s workshop of engineering gadgetry. Computer keyboards and circuit boards spill from cardboard boxes. Cables, wires, and an assortment of tools hang from wall hooks.…

Read More

No Day at the Beach

No Day at the Beach

Field research in oceanography is no day at the beach—even when it’s at the beach. Just ask the students who spent last summer doing research on a swash zone near Seattle.…

Read More

A Glacier’s Pace

A Glacier's Pace

Time was, saying something moved “at a glacier’s pace” meant it was grindingly slow. No longer. Glaciers don’t move like that anymore. Since the early 1990s, glaciers in Greenland have…

Read More

Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake

When I was a boy growing up in China, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake near the city of Tangshan killed more than 242,000 people and severely injured 170,000 more. More than 7,000…

Read More

New Head of WHOI Fleet Comes Aboard

New Head of WHOI Fleet Comes Aboard

<!– –> Sometimes, a career change has the feel of deferred destiny. “I was in the Caribbean,” said Rob Munier, “at Grand Cayman Island, doing graduate work in the mid-1970s,…

Read More

A Robot Is Resurrected at Sea

A Robot Is Resurrected at Sea

Barely a month after the undersea robot ABE imploded and was lost in the depths, ABE’s “son,” Sentry, suffered fire and flooding that destroyed critical internal components. But a team…

Read More

Undersea Asphalt Volcanoes Discovered

Undersea Asphalt Volcanoes Discovered

The dome-like mounds poking up in sonar maps of the seafloor caught scientists’ eyes. They stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding environment off the coast of Santa Barbara,…

Read More