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NEWS RELEASES
WHOI scientists aim to improve the study of marine heatwaves
Researchers call for regional and context-specific approaches to these extreme events
Coastal retreat in Alaska is accelerating because of compound climate impacts
Observations have shown coastal erosion as an increasing Arctic hazard, but other hazards—including sea level rise and permafrost thaw subsidence—have received less attention.
A new report on coastal resilience
New report released during NY Climate Week and upcoming UN General Assembly high-level plenary meeting on threats posed by sea level rise
Can adding iron to the ocean help it absorb CO2?
A newly published article spells out the work needed to assess the potential of ocean iron fertilization as a low cost, scalable, and rapidly deployable method of mCDR.
Sea Surface Temperature Research Provides Clear Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change
New oceanic research provides clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change and shows that specific signals from human activities have altered the seasonal cycle amplitude of sea surface temperatures.
WHOI | OCEANUS
Letter from Kangiqsujuaq
Charlie’s Motel was a welcome break from Kangiqsujuaq’s airport in northernmost Quebec, where we had just spent six hours uselessly waiting for the plane that would take us home. But it was too windy for the plane to land that August day in 2006. Charlie’s place was not much of a motel at all. It looked like a house, with no neon sign and, in fact, no vacancies—the house was rented to miners for the…
Dead Corals Do Tell Tales
Sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, a tiny drifting larva found the perfect piece of real estate to settle down, on the shallow seafloor off the island of Bermuda. It sprouted tentacles to catch prey, revealing itself as a coral polyp, and a few days later, the small flower-shaped animal began to build a hard exterior skeleton. The polyp grew and divided, eventually multiplying into a colony of thousands, with the round shape…
Why the West Wind Wobbles
Winds and temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere vary from month to month and year to year in countless ways. Decades of monitoring the weather and climate have revealed a few simple patterns that explain much of this variability. The severity of wintertime climate over North America and Europe, for example, has been strongly linked to the most prominent atmospheric pattern in the Northern Hemisphere, which is called the “northern annular mode.” It is a natural shift…
Sunspots, Sea Changes, and Climate Shifts
Natural materials such as shells, ice, corals, and tree rings contain clues to help scientists piece together how our oceans, atmosphere, and land have changed in the past. The history of the Earth is recorded in many different chemical codes and languages, however, so we geochemists and paleoceanographers create tools that help us translate what the planet is telling us. My research focuses on developing tools to trace environmental changes that occurred over millennia and…
Lakes and Climates Have Their Ups and Downs
Between 5,400 and 3,000 years ago, something happened to New England’s climate. The region became drier. Water levels in lakes dropped. Several droughts persisted for hundreds of years, changing the makeup of local tree and plant populations. Animal and insect populations probably shifted accordingly. Climate change is not just about temperature change. We don’t know what caused it, but New England’s hydrology—the distribution and circulation of its water—fundamentally changed in the not-so-distant past, and the…
Publications
IN THE NEWS - RESEARCH HIGLIGHTS
Study offers first definitive proof that Gulf Stream has weakened
“New research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution offers the first conclusive evidence that the Gulf Stream has weakened. The powerful ocean current off the East Coast influences regional weather, climate and fisheries, and the finding could have significant implications both for New England and the global climate.”
What 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…
Maine’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.