Multimedia

Two Galapagos Swallow Tailed Gulls glide in the sky above the R/V Atlantis during a 2010 expedition. The birds, which are the only fully nocturnal gulls and seabirds in the…

Hydrothermal vent crabs thrive under enough pressure to crush a car, but can survive at the surface for months or more. They also regularly move between the cold of the…

In 1986, when the shuttle orbiter Atlantis flew its second mission, WHOI Director John H. Steele was among those invited to witness the nighttime launch, because the shuttle was named…

Tiny. Ubiquitous. Vital. Delicate. Vulnerable. All these words describe pteropods (“wing-foot”). These marine snails are also called “sea butterflies” because of their winglike swimming appendages. Masses of pteropods drift with…

Puffins in Iceland are one of the many interests of WHOI acoustic biologist Aran Mooney. During a recent trip to Husavik on the north shore of the island, members of his…

In her experiments to investigate antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the ocean, former MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Megan May grew bacteria collected from beaches in petri dishes. She embedded small white…

The current shipyard period for the research vessel Atlantis includes maintenance to the hangar used to house the human-occupied submersible Alvin. So the ship’s crew and yard workers took the…

A black smoker chimney billows from a hydrothermal vent site called “Snake Pit” on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was photographed by scientists Holger Jannasch and Cindy Van Dover diving in…

Alvin engineer and pilot Danik Forsman holds a seafloor heat blanket used to measure the heat flow from the seafloor. Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Ross Parnell-Turner reads its weight. Prior…

The Galápagos Islands are home to species found nowhere else on Earth, such as this land iguana. This unique ecosystem depends on nutrients brought to the islands by the Equatorial…

Chris Lathan, a former pilot of the human-occupied submersible Alvin, works during ths sub’s upgrade that was completed in 2014, 50 years after the original Alvin was launched. He’s working on the…

The autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) Sentry returned to the research vessel Atlantis recently after an overnight mission to map the seafloor ahead of a dive by the human-occupied submersible Alvin…

This artists’ rendition illustrates the unusual confluence of waters that occurs beneath the surface of the Bay of Bengal. From the west comes warm, salty waters (yellow) formed in the…

WHOI engineers Rick Krishfield (right) and Kris Newhall take part of an ice-tethered profiler (ITP) for a sled ride in Resolute Bay, Canada, before deploying it on an Arctic Ocean…

Alvin expedition leader Todd Litke (left) and pilot Danik Forsman prepare the human-occupied submersible to make its first dive of a recent expedition to explore the geology and geochemistry of…

This is a bird’s-eye view of a blue hole in the Bahamas. In the middle of it, WHOI researchers in a pontoon boat prepare to extract cores of sediments that…

This image of a blue iceberg, calved off a glacier, was captured on a research trip to waters off Greenland. Its striking color indicates that the ice in it is…