Multimedia Items
How bacteria is transported through the environment into the ocean
Much of our waste from homes, hospitals, and farms contains bacteria and antibiotics that make their way to wastewater treatment plants and rivers and end up in the ocean, where…
Read MoreOcean eddies transporting plankton throughout the water column
Plankton in the ocean can help reduce the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide building up in our atmosphere. Like plants, they use carbon dioxide to grow and are eaten by…
Read MoreThe Arctic Ocean Ecosystem
Despite the harsh weather and the ice cover, the Arctic Ocean is teeming with life. It has a complex but abundance ecosystem that supports large predators such as walruses, polar…
Read MoreThe Ocean is Earth’s Oxygen Bank
Oxygen is like money for Earth, and the ocean acts like a bank. Deposits are made in three ocean layers: At the surface through exchange with air, in the water, when phytoplankton produce O2 from sunlight and CO2, and on the seafloor where plants and corals live. Withdrawals occur when organisms consume oxygen. Oxygen is tightly connected to life in the ocean, and can tell us a lot about an ecosystem’s health & productivity. This is why we need an ocean oxygen budget. A simple idea, but has been difficult until now.
Read MoreGroundwater and the Ocean
Groundwater comes from precipitation that falls on land. Some of this water evaporates into the atmosphere, gets taken up by plants, or flows into streams, but some infiltrates into the…
Read MoreNot Quiet on the Ocean Front
Mara Freilich, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, is exploring where plankton thrives in the ocean. Her research area is the Mediterranean Sea, where less-salty, less-dense water from…
Read MoreA Mythic Ocean Instrument
WHOI scientist Benjamin Van Mooy (right) and MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Jamie Collins flank the proof-of-concept version of an instrument called PHORCYS. Van Mooy co-developed the device to make…
Read MoreOceanography, Up Close
WHOI biologist Gareth Lawson (center), MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Stephan Gallagher (right), and MIT undergraduate Elisabeth Boles examine a sample of seawater full of tiny plants and animals known as…
Read MoreMany Languages, One Ocean
Corals, coral health, and the threats facing reefs worldwide will be just a few of the items on the agenda at a new conference tomorrow at WHOI. “Oceanos: WHOI en Español…
Read MoreAnimals Behaving Like Plants
Meet a curious single-celled organism called Mesodinium rubrum. They are shaped like “8”s with hairlike cilia around them that they use to swim in the ocean. They usually graze on…
Read MoreOcean Iron Links
Many areas of the ocean are nutrient-rich, but lack iron, which fuels the growth of phytoplankton, tiny plant-like organisms that form the base of the ocean food chain and play…
Read MoreGetting a Better View of the Arctic Ocean
On a rare sunny day in the Arctic, optical instruments are deployed off of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) vessel Oscar Dyson in the Chukchi Sea. WHOI postdoctoral…
Read MoreFarming in the Ocean
Will Ostrom (blue hard hat), a senior engineering assistant in the WHOI Department of Physical Oceanography, and Joe Alvernes, a crewmember of the fishing vessel Nobska, scrape mussels from a…
Read MorePreserving the Plants
Dick Backus, a WHOI scientist emeritus and curator emeritus of the Herbarium at the Marine Biological Laboratory/WHOI Library, works on identifying another plant specimen with Pam Polloni, acting curator. The…
Read MoreThe Equatorial Undercurrent
At the equator, trade winds push a surface current from east to west. About 100 to 200 meters below, a swift countercurrent flows in the opposite direction. This Equatorial Undercurrent…
Read MoreSingle-celled life relationships illustration
Bacteria and unicellular marine plants called diatoms depend on each other for some essential nutrients, but they also compete for other nutrients. So life gets complicated in the chemical soup…
Read MorePhotosynthesis process featuring its light and dark stages
WHOI biologist Sam Laney studies the daily lives of single-celled plants in the ocean known as phytoplankton. The organisms carry out photosynthesis within specialized organelles called chloroplasts, which contain the…
Read MoreHow the Fraser River picks up chemical signatures along its journey
The Fraser River in western Canada picks up chemical signatures from the environment through which it flows. Scientists can analyze samples from the river to track a geochemical journey that…
Read MoreThere Goes the Neighborhood
A curious penguin observes a group of scientists temporarily squatting on an icy terrain in Antarctica. WHOI scientist Ben Van Mooy (right) is leading a team that will core through…
Read MoreWhat Lies Under the Beach?
A team of international scientists led by Ken Buesseler at WHOI dug pits to sample sand and groundwater at a popular surfing beach in Yotsukura, Japan, for residual radioactivity released…
Read MoreProtecting the Troops
During World War II, WHOI scientists and engineers contributed to the war effort with some 40 projects that advanced understanding of underwater sound, helped predict the movement of currents and…
Read MoreBacteria and Diatoms
Bacteria and unicellular marine plants called diatoms depend on each other for some essential nutrients, but they also compete for other nutrients. So life gets complicated in the chemical soup…
Read MoreSnow Globe of Plankton
2018 Summer Student Fellows Maya Chung (Harvard University) and David Brinkley (Amherst College) marvel at a jar of plankton collected from Buzzards Bay in mid-July. The samples were collected during…
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