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Marine Chemistry & Geochemistry


An aquatic outbreak

Leslie Henderson and Blake Gardner, divers with the C.O.R.E. St. Croix Coral Strike Team, use syringes to apply an amoxicillin paste to a section of affected pillar coral off the coast of St. Croix. (Photo by Jason Quetel, © VI-DAC)

Stony coral tissue loss disease continues devastating Caribbean reefs. Here’s what we know about it so far

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How do corals form colonies?

If you stare at just one spot on a coral reef, your eyes could be seeing more than 1,000 animals per square foot. That’s because the thing that makes up most of these marine ecosystems are tiny living animals called coral polyps, which exist on the surface of reef formations.

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Dissolving oil in a sunlit sea

A team of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers discovered that nearly 10 percent of the oil floating on the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon disaster was dissolved into seawater by sunlight – a process called “photo-dissolution”. The findings were published today in the paper “Sunlight-driven dissolution is a major fate of oil at sea” in Science Advances.

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The ocean twilight zone’s role in climate change

OTZ's role in climate change

A new report from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Ocean Twilight Zone (OTZ) project team offers a detailed look at the climate-altering processes that take place within the zone, in particular those that are driven by animals that migrate between the twilight zone and the surface each night to feed. This phenomenon is likely the biggest migration on Earth—yet it remains incredibly vulnerable to human exploitation.

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What makes the ocean salty?

beach

The water flowing into the ocean comes from freshwater streams and rivers. These bodies of water do contain salt. It dissolves from rocks on land. That’s because rain is slightly acidic.

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