Multimedia
Beautiful Plankton for an Urgent Cause
Diatoms—a type of phytoplankton—are intricate and beautiful under the microscope. In this composite image, a micrograph of a diatom is flanked by a pair of diatom-inspired earrings created by survivors…
Read MoreRaindrops on the Ocean
Most of the surface of Earth is covered by ocean, so it follows that most of the rain falling on the planet falls on the ocean. That rain, in turn,…
Read MoreRed Boat, White Ice, Blue Sea
During a recent cruise on R/V Neil Armstrong for the Overturning of the Subpolar North Atlantic Program (OSNAP), WHOI scientist Bob Pickart and his team sent a small boat out…
Read MoreUnder Threat
A shell-less pteropod swims under sea ice in Antarctica. Pteropods are small marine snails that use wing-like appendages to “fly” though the water. For that reason, shelled pteropods are commonly…
Read MoreTarget: Science
WHOI coastal scientist Peter Traykovski sets up a GPS target for a remotely operated aerial vehicle in the North River estuary in Marshfield, Mass., this past September. The drone imaging…
Read MoreAOPE Slideshow
AOPE Top Story Slideshow
A Piece of History
This antique medicine chest was used by the crew of the original Atlantis, WHOI’s first research vessel and the first ship built for oceanographic research. The chest retired with the…
Read MoreWe Can FIXIT
Engineer Brian Hogue works on a McLane Moored Profiler (MMP) in WHOI’s Field Instrumentation and eXperiment Implementation Team (FIXIT) lab. Hogue is one half of a two-man team with fellow…
Read MoreLetting Go
A buoy built at WHOI is deployed from the R/V Roger Revelle in the Pacific Ocean in 2016. The buoy, outfitted with dozens of sensors above and below the water,…
Read MoreMore Eyes Are Better
When the human-occupied submersible Alvin dives, it does so increasingly with the help of the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry. Here, WHOI scientist Dana Yoerger provides Mike Perfit from the University of Florida and…
Read MoreBreak Point
From the air, this rift in the Ross Ice Shelf might appear to be a small crack, but it is actually 300 feet wide and tens of miles long. The…
Read MoreWHOI Women Wear Red
Wearing red in recognition of International Women’s Day yesterday, WHOI engineers and assistants check out a newly-developed in-line instrument frame. Three in-line frames will be added to the surface moorings…
Read MoreWomen on the Sea
WHOI mooring technician Meghan Donohue (left) gets ready to guide an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) into the water off the deck of the R/V Nathaniel B. Palmer. Donohue led…
Read MoreRock Grab
A pilot inside the submersible Alvin uses one of the vehicle’s manipulator arms to pick up some unusual geological samples: popping rocks. WHOI scientists collected them in 2016, on this…
Read MoreIn-the-Field Experience
Ithaca College senior Cynthia Becker (left) helps WHOI microbial ecologist Amy Apprill collect a water sample off the southern coast of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Apprill uses…
Read MoreTracking Salt Marsh Carbon
WHOI scientists are studying this Waquoit Bay salt marsh to better understand the role wetlands play in storing carbon and exporting it to the coastal ocean. Here, research assistant Kate Morkeski (right)…
Read MoreFinding Life in Whale Breath
The 96-well micro-titre plate is a standard piece of laboratory equipment used to hold small amounts of liquid samples for testing. This particular plate was put to a decidedly non-standard…
Read MoreMeasuring Salty Seas
WHOI senior engineering assistant Ben Pietro oversees a deployment of yellow “hardhats” on the R/V Revelle during a 2016 expedition to the eastern tropical Pacific, where some of the highest rainfall rates…
Read MoreCommunicating Under Ice
A lone buoy sits atop Arctic sea ice in the Canadian Basin—a yellow dot in a vast field of white. Suspended in the water below the buoy, a beacon sends…
Read MoreJar of Jelly
A small jellyfish sits in a beaker in the icebreaker Polarstern‘s shipboard lab. On an expedition in October 2016 to the Arctic Ocean, scientists and engineers from WHOI’s Deep Subergence…
Read MoreBlue Holes and Hurricanes
The dark blue patch in the bottom right of this aerial shot of Discovery Bay, Jamaica, is a “blue hole.” These large sinkholes formed as caves on land during the…
Read MoreFollow the Turtles
Kara Dodge, a postdoctoral investigator at WHOI, tags a leatherback turtle during a 2016 expedition in Vineyard Sound. Dodge and WHOI engineer Amy Kukulya are the brains and muscle behind TurtleCam, an initiative they…
Read MoreIsland in the Stream
Jarvis Island is a tiny dot in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean right on the equator. This uninhabited 1¾-square-mile island rises barely 20 feet out of the ocean.…
Read More