Multimedia Items

The Canadian icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent negotiates thick ice floes near Beaufort Gyre, a major Artic Ocean circulation system north of Alaska. Global warming may be disrupting the natural rhythms…

This oceanographic tool— a Van Veen grab sampler—collects seafloor sediments. It’s probably not the first thing you might expect to find on a research cruise led by a physical oceanographer. But…

WHOI engineer Brian Hogue assembles a new aluminum frame around a Nobska MAVS-4 acoustic current meter. The frame helps to minimize turbulence around the current meter once it is installed…

WHOI engineers led by Lee Freitag have developed and tested a long-distance communications system that would transmit and receive signals under Arctic Ocean sea ice. They exploited a naturally occurring…

The ocean’s global circulation transports heat around the planet, from the equator to the poles, thus regulating Earth’s climate. Two major cogs in this planetary system are the Gulf Stream-North…

This year marked the tenth year of the Beaufort Gyre Exploration Project led by WHOI physical oceanographer Andrey Proshutinsky and Richard Krishfield. Funded by the National Science Foundation, Fisheries and…

Simulated models of how plastics are transported in the global ocean show that most plastics concentrate in the middle of subtropical gyres (left). However, large-scale ocean circulation systems such as…

In 2013, a WHOI-led research team set sail for the Eastern Beaufort Sea. Their mission: to search for evidence of a huge, ancient, freshwater flood caused by the melting of…

The U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy steams through “pancake” sea ice in the Arctic Ocean in October 2013. WHOI physical oceanographer Bob Pickart led the cruise to complete a ten-year…

The bow of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy plows a path through sea ice in the Beaufort Sea. Evidence of Earth’s changing climate is especially visible in the Arctic,…

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…

Twin Otter planes are packed full of buoys, cables, and other equipment for flights from Banks Island north of Canada onto the Arctic Ocean ice pack. The planes carry 2,000…

During the austral summer of 2016, WHOI scientists Viviane Menezes and Alison Macdonald traveled to Antarctica to study a physical ocean process known as Antarctic Bottom Water or AABW. In…

Photographed in a drop of water, this shrimp-like crustacean is tiny—about the size of a fingernail. It comes from Barrow Canyon, a seafloor feature in the Arctic Ocean that’s particularly…

WHOI researchers Kris Newhall (left) and Rick Krishfield (right), and Brian Mackenzie, crew member of the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent, set up an ice-tethered profiler to collect…

Scientists drill a hole through meter-thick sea ice to collect water samples in the Arctic Ocean. MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Lauren Kipp was among scientists from several research institutions…