Feature on News & Insight
Robot designed by Texas university to explore underwater glacial walls to monitor climate change
Engineered to survive ice-covered seas by project partner the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the remotely operated vehicle Nereid Under Ice (NUI) will brave icebergs and riptides to approach within feet of the glaciers and return with data and samples from their underwater environment.
Read MoreWhat We Know About Oceans and Climate Change
Climate scientists are increasingly turning their attention to oceans. For a deep dive into the science shaping our understanding of the Earth’s watery depths, host Bill Loveless spoke with Peter de Menocal, president and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Read MoreOn Cape Cod, the latest barrage of wind and waves, exacerbated by climate change, turns concern to desperation
The coastal erosion and flooding from the weekend storm could have been far worse, especially on Nantucket, where sea levels rose 3 feet higher than the typical high tide, said Christopher Piecuch, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Read MoreHow a colossal block of ice became an obsession
A keen observer is Dr. Catherine Walker from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. As a graduate student in the 2000s, she was tasked with studying those cracks in the Amery Ice Shelf. “It was actually sort of sad to see it go, because it was something that I’d had all this time, and then it was gone,” Catherine tells me. “I really appreciate Kevin’s paintings. I feel like that’s my entire career right there.”
Read MoreWoods Hole report identifies concerns, possible solutions for harmful algae blooms
HABs are a growing problem in the U.S., especially coastal states; a new report from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod identifies several areas of concern and ongoing research to find solutions.
Read More11 epic mysteries scientists totally can’t solve
As you dive deeper into the ocean, less and less sunlight shines through, and about 200 meters beneath the surface, you reach an area called the “twilight zone.” Sunlight fades almost completely out of view, and our knowledge about these dark depths fades too. “It’s almost easier to define it by what we don’t know than what we do know,” Andone Lavery, an acoustician at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Vox’s Byrd Pinkerton.
Read MoreWHOI scientist wrote a book on right whales’ possible extinction. Why you should know him.
WOODS HOLE — In the postscript to his new book, “We Are All Whalers,” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution whale researcher Michael Moore goes where few scientists are comfortable to go, and where most scientists take deliberate steps to avoid.
Read MoreIn a First, Alaska’s Arctic Waters Appear Poised for Dangerous Algal Blooms
According to Evie Fachon, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the dinoflagellates likely drifted north as inert cysts from warmer waters, and have been lying on the seafloor for some unknown amount of time.
Read MoreA Critical Ocean Current Is Speeding Up, With Potential Global Consequences
An international team of researchers used decades’ worth of data from satellites and a global network of ocean floats to determine that as the Southern Ocean around Antarctica is growing warmer, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) is flowing faster. “From both observations and models, we find that the ocean heat change is causing the significant ocean current acceleration detected during recent decades,” said Jia-Rui Shi, a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Read MoreClimate-change clues contained in whaling logbooks kept in the Providence library
Researchers Caroline Ummenhofer and Timothy Walker are searching through information collected on the Isaac Howland and other 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century whalers to find clues about how global wind…
Read MoreThe Mystery of Why Our Ancestors Left Africa
How might climate variability have shaped H. erectus? The marine geologist and climate scientist Peter de Menocal, the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, has studied changes in climate 1.9 million…
Read MoreCan we harness the natural power of the ocean to fight climate change?
A top priority for science is to advance our understanding and monitoring of the oceans so that we can measure impacts and viability of these potential solutions. Specifically, this means developing more complete understanding of how the ocean works…
Read MoreNeed to Avoid Carbon ‘Gold Rush’ in the Ocean: Peter de Menocal
WHOI president and director Peter de Menocal speaks on the urgency and scale of ocean carbon capture and storage solutions.
Read MoreSunlight Exposure for 100 Hours or Less Melts Plastics, Breaks Them Down Into Smaller Soup of New Chemicals
Microplastics are considered a major environmental hazard that is produced from the disintegration of plastics. Sadly, many of them end up in oceans and pollute or contaminate the waters and…
Read MoreA Recent Reversal Discovered in the Response of Greenland’s Ice Caps to Climate Change
New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published on…
Read More‘Rolls-Royce’ of shark cameras can extend to turtles, whales, seals and squid for ocean’s big picture
A high-tech SharkCam invented by a Cape Cod researcher offers an unprecedented window into the lives of the ocean’s toothy predators, and can also extend to seals, whales, turtles and…
Read MoreMelting ice imperils 98% of Emperor penguin colonies by 2100
WASHINGTON (AP) — With climate change threatening the sea ice habitat of Emperor penguins, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced a proposal to list the species as…
Read MoreWhat Happens to Marine Life When There Isn’t Enough Oxygen?
In September of 2017, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution postdoctoral scholar Maggie Johnson was conducting an experiment with a colleague in Bocas del Toro off the Caribbean coast of Panama. After…
Read MoreSharks and the ocean’s twilight zone: Some female great white sharks can deep dive for hours
Much of the shark focus around the Cape is on great whites roaming close to the shoreline as they prowl for seals, but researchers are finding out that several sharks…
Read More‘What we know now is how much we don’t know’: Enter the strange world of the ocean twilight zone
A difficult area to study and often overlooked by science, new technology is aiding its exploration, forcing researchers to re-evaluate just how much life is down there. Researchers now believe…
Read MoreRobot Dives 3,000 Feet to Film Creatures in Mid-Ocean ‘Twilight Zone’
Bioluminescent creatures and others inhabiting the dark depths 3,000 feet below the surface in the mid-ocean “twilight zone” — beyond the reach of sunlight — are now being documented by a…
Read MoreAlvin: Pioneer of the Deep
The deep-sea submersible Alvin has brought explorers to extraordinary places for more than 50 years. Now, as Alvin is poised to continue its revolutionary scientific work, a new set of…
Read MoreMaine’s having a lobster boom. A bust may be coming.
The waters off Maine’s coast are warming, and no one knows what that’s going to mean for the state’s half-billion-dollar-a-year lobster industry—the largest single-species fishery in North America. Some fear that continued warming could cause the lobster population to collapse. To understand what’s happening to the ecosystem of the Gulf of Maine, says Glen Gawarkiewicz, an oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, you have to look beyond it—see how it’s affected by the atmosphere, ocean currents, and rivers that flow into it.
Read MoreCommerce Secretary Raimondo visits Woods Hole
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited Massachusetts on Friday to tour the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Northeast Fisheries Science Center. The…
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