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Jason Versus the Volcano

Jason Versus the Volcano

Through the camera eyes of the undersea vehicle Jason, scientists were investigating a quietly bubbling pit on the side of a large volcano on the seafloor south of Japan in…

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Chilly Scenes of Winter off Cape Cod

Chilly Scenes of Winter off Cape Cod

When winter winds began rattling the storm windows last autumn, Andrey Shcherbina and Glen Gawarkiewicz shook the mothballs out of their cold-weather exposure suits and dusted off their sea boots.…

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Scientists Gear Up to Launch Ocean Observing Networks

Scientists Gear Up to Launch Ocean Observing Networks

Oceanography is on the verge of a revolution. Scientists and engineers have been dreaming up networks of permanent observing outposts that could probe from the sea surface to the seafloor from many different locations in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. And that dream may take a big step toward reality if Congress agrees to the National Science Foundation’s six-year Ocean Observatories Initiative.

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Voyage Takes a Census of Life in the Sea

Voyage Takes a Census of Life in the Sea

Scientists collected more than 1,000 shrimplike creatures, swimming snails and worms, and gelatinous animals, including many species never seen before, on a landmark cruise to take inventory of the ocean’s…

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A Laser Light in the Ocean Depths

A Laser Light in the Ocean Depths

Graduate student Anna Michel is adapting laser technology to the murky fluid environment and crushing pressures at depths of 11,000 feet. The goal is to develop an instrument that can directly measure the many elements spewing from hydrothermal vents just as they emerge from Earth?s crust.

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Into the ‘Mouth of Hell’

Into the 'Mouth of Hell'

Ken Sims peers over the rim of Masaya Volcano and looks 2,000 feet (600 meters) down into the smoking crater lined with rows of jagged rocks that jut up like…

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Abandoned Walrus Calves Reported in the Arctic

Abandoned Walrus Calves Reported in the Arctic

Researchers on an oceanographic voyage in the Arctic Ocean report, for the first time, baby walruses unaccompanied by mothers in areas far from shore and over deep water, where they likely could not survive. The phenomenon was coincident with movement of warm water into Arctic basins and subsequent melting of the sea ice that walruses normally utilize as resting platforms.

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Building a Computer Model to Forecast Red Tides

The algae Alexandrium fundyense are notorious for producing a toxin that accumulates in shellfish such as clams, mussels, and oysters, leading to paralytic shellfish poisoning in humans. The microscopic plants…

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To Catch an Erupting Volcano

To Catch an Erupting Volcano

Augustine, an island volcano 170 miles southwest of Anchorage, Alaska, began erupting in December 2005. By February, Uri ten Brink of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Woods Hole had…

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Do Fishing Regulations Lead to More Accidents?

Do Fishing Regulations Lead to More Accidents?

Fishermen have argued that regulations about when and where they can catch fish have caused more sinkings and fatal accidents at sea. But a new statistical analysis by Woods Hole researchers has found no hard evidence to support that argument.

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Noxious Gas from the Mouth of Hell…

Noxious Gas from the Mouth of Hell...

The hidden world of salps OFF THE ANTARCTIC PENNISULA—Biologists Larry Madin (WHOI) and Patricia Kremer (U. Connecticut) led a month-long cruise in January 2006 aboard the ice-strengthened ship L.M. Gould…

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A ‘Book’ of Ancient Sumatran Tsunamis

A 'Book' of Ancient Sumatran Tsunamis

Exactly one year after the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Jian Lin found himself on a Chinese research vessel off Sumatra, floating above the epicenter of the seafloor earthquake that…

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Worlds Apart, But United by the Oceans

Worlds Apart, But United by the Oceans

Jian Lin came of age in an era of both geological and political seismic shifts in China, experiencing the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century in Tangshen in 1976 and the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Then he immigrated to America and came full circle in 2005 to become the first U.S. scientist to co-lead a Chinese deep-sea research cruise.

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Changing the Course of Rivers and History

Changing the Course of Rivers and History

Punjab means “five rivers.” The region in northern Pakistan is named for the great rivers that branch through the landscape, creating an ancient cradle of civilization and a modern agricultural…

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