Feature
Are Whales ‘Shouting’ to be Heard?
When we’re talking with friends and a truck rumbles by or someone cranks up the radio, we talk louder. Now scientists have found that North Atlantic right whales do the…
Read MoreMicrobes Hitch Rides on Plastics in the Sea
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the International Census of Marine Microbes initiative.
Read MoreThe Icebot
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 MoreScientists Find that Squid Can Detect Sounds
The ordinary squid, Loligo pealii, is well known as a kind of floating buffet. “Almost every type of marine organism feeds somehow off squid,” said biologist T. Aran Mooney, a…
Read MoreWill More Acidic Oceans Be Noisier?
In 2008, a group of marine chemists raised a red flag: As the ocean becomes more acidic over the next century, they said, noise from ships will be able to…
Read MoreHow 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 MoreTracking 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 MoreCold-water Diving
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 MoreBoy Scouts Get a Taste of Oceanography
WHOI engineer Paul Fucile took some time off this summer to volunteer at this year’s Boy Scout National Jamboree and give a glimpse of ocean research to boys who had…
Read MorePlastic 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 MoreSalps 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 MoreAlvin 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 MoreA ‘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 MoreA 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 MoreScience 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 MoreThe 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 MoreBasic Sea Cable Gets a High-tech Upgrade
In April, when the Deepwater Horizon petroleum drilling rig exploded and oil began gushing from a drill hole almost a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and engineers…
Read MoreNo 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 MoreHolography and Oceanography
ROV Jason Images the Discovery of the Deepest Explosive Eruption on the Sea Floor
<!– –> West Mata Eruption, 2009 Courtesy NSF, NOAA, and WHOI Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab
Read MoreA 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 MoreLessons 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