Physical Oceanography
Powerful Currents in Deep-Sea Gorges
On my first major research cruise, the ship was hit by a hurricane. On the second, the weather was even worse. In one particularly nasty storm, I remember standing braced…
Read MoreBetween the Beach and the Deep Blue Sea
Capt. Ken Houtler laughed when I remarked that I didn’t know the sun rose this early as I boarded his ship last summer. Now climbing aboard again in January, I…
Read MoreThe Ghost Mooring
Just before leaving for a long-awaited vacation, Scott Worrilow came in to work on a Monday morning in April 2011, just for a few minutes, to do a routine daily…
Read MoreAnother Piece in the Arctic Puzzle
It’s spring again, and while most of us are putting away our winter coats and watching our flowers pop up, it’s time for Rick Krishfield and Kris Newhall to don…
Read MoreWhere Ocean and Ice Meet
Gliders Tracked Potential for Oil to Reach the East Coast
In the initial days of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a spotlight shone on a little-known watery cog in the ocean’s circulatory machinery: the Loop Current in the Gulf of Mexico.…
Read MoreOf Wings, Waves, and Winds
“Great albatross! The meanest birds Spring up and flit away, While thou must toil to gain a flight, And spread those pinions grey; But when they once are fairly poised,…
Read MoreWhen ‘The Fish Are Biting’ Is Bad News
<!– –> Among the odds and ends in Rick Trask’s office is the tip of a swordfish bill, mounted on a piece of wood and displayed on the windowsill. For…
Read MoreWhere the Food Is in the Sea, and Why
When you’re on a boat 50 miles south of Cape Cod on a calm day, the water around you may look flat and relatively featureless. A few hundred feet below,…
Read MoreExploring the Arctic in the Midst of Change
Chief Scientist Bob Pickart and his 26-member science team were in the hangar at the Barrow Air Search and Rescue Station, waiting for the helicopter. An Inupiat community barnacled to…
Read MoreBuilding Them Tough, Bringing Them Back
Fifty years ago, on Dec. 11, 1960, a group of scientists, engineers, and technicians from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution set a doughnut-shaped buoy into the waters off Bermuda. Anchored by…
Read MoreWHOI Engineer Turns Author
The Icebot
Boy Scouts Get a Taste of Oceanography
WHOI engineer Paul Fucile took some time off this summer to volunteer at this year’s Boy Scout National Jamboree and give a glimpse of ocean research to boys who had…
Read MoreThe Call of the Sea
Marshall Swartz’s lab is a Santa’s workshop of engineering gadgetry. Computer keyboards and circuit boards spill from cardboard boxes. Cables, wires, and an assortment of tools hang from wall hooks.…
Read MoreBasic Sea Cable Gets a High-tech Upgrade
In April, when the Deepwater Horizon petroleum drilling rig exploded and oil began gushing from a drill hole almost a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and engineers…
Read MoreMysteries at High Latitudes
We were watching waves, Kjetil Våge and I, from the open transom on the research vessel Knorr. It was mid-October 2008 in the Irminger Sea, where nautical standards are different.…
Read MoreInto the Wild Irminger Sea
In the Denmark Strait, Oct. 7, 2008 Maybe it’s lubberly to talk about those waves in the language of aesthetics, as if they were natural attractions like alpine peaks, but…
Read MoreFloats Reveal Unknown Ocean Pathways
Oceanographers have long known that the image they used to portray the oceans’ global circulation—called the Ocean Conveyor—was an oversimplification. It’s useful, but akin to describing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as…
Read MoreAs the World Turns and the Oceans Flow
Our planet is full of fascinating flowing fluids. Jack Whitehead has investigated all sorts of them around the globe—hardly ever leaving his laboratory. There’s the once-mysterious Alborán Gyre, for example,…
Read MoreOcean Conveyor’s ‘Pump’ Switches Back On
One of the “pumps” that helps drive the ocean’s global circulation suddenly switched on again last winter for the first time this decade. The finding surprised scientists who had been…
Read MoreWhat Makes the Great Ocean Currents Flow?
The Ultimate Fluid Environment for Scientists
‘Green’ Energy Powers Undersea Glider
Researchers have successfully flown the first thermal glider through the ocean—a robotic vehicle that can propel itself for several months across thousands of miles, using only heat energy from the…
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