Multimedia

The Galápagos archipelago is made up of 13 major volcanic islands that occupy a submerged platform rising more than three kilometers (nearly two miles) above the seafloor. During an expedition…

Kan-Min of the Dongsha Atoll Research Station steers a research vessel over Dongsha’s coral reef in the South China Sea, where former MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Tom DeCarlo conducted fieldwork.…

Far below the ocean floor, sediments are teeming with bizarre, zombie-like microbes. Although they’re technically alive, they grow in slow motion, and can take decades for a single cell to…

Most of the countless animals in the ocean twilight zone do not have a backbone. Invertebrates include zooplankton and jellies and account for much of the life beyond the reach of…

This coral’s stark white color indicates that it is stressed, probably by warming water. Most corals host a type of algae that produce food for the live coral polyps and…

A staghorn coral branch (Acropora cervicornis) on a reef west of St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, suffers from White Band Syndrome, a coral disease that has been a significant source…

Under a microscope, a copepod looks fearsome, but at only one-sixteenth of an inch, it won’t bother anyone. People seldom see these tiny marine crustaceans, but they may be the…

Gliding on hundreds of tiny suction-cup feet, A Crown-of-thorns sea star roams the reef, consuming immobile corals and leaving bare coral skeleton behind. Common in the Pacific and Indian Oceans…

WHOI Engineer Kevin Manganini escorts a JetYak autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) through the waters off Chappaquidick, which became its own island in 2007 after a storm created an inlet that separated it…

Genetic material in seawater provides WHOI biologist Annette Govindarajan with clues to investigate species in the ocean twilight zone. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

A plucky Adelie penguin clears a meltwater stream stained brown by the acres of guano it has trickled through. “The Adelie is this really tough little character that doesn’t have…

WHOI geologist Konrad Hughen took this photo during a 2015 expedition to conduct coral reef surveys and obtain coral core samples on several reefs within the Chagos Archipelago, a small…

In a sign that the current maintenance period for the research vessel Atlantis is almost completed, yard workers at the Mares Island Naval Ship Yard recently flooded the drydock where they…

Molly Anderson, a master’s student at Boise State University, takes a close look at the inside of a piece of basalt recently recovered from the seafloor by the human-occupied submersible Alvin.…

Emperor penguin chicks hatch into the frozen world of Antarctica—one of Earth’s most inhospitable places. A recent study reveals what the juveniles do in the critical early months when they…