Skip to content

Multimedia Items


Sailors’ Bane

Sailors' Bane

Barnacles and other organisms cling to the hull of R/V Knorr. Such “biofouling” greatly increases frictional drag on ships, costing ship owners millions of dollars a year in added fuel…

Read More

A First Time for Everything

A First Time for Everything

The R/V Lance is an old sealing vessel that was converted by the Norwegian Polar Institute to support oceanographic research. Its design requires moorings to be deployed off the ship’s…

Read More

Prickly Plankton

Prickly Plankton

Species of the single-celled phytoplankton Trichodesmium form colonies with distinctive shapes. Individual colonies, shown here, are visible to the naked eye. Where currents and winds gather many colonies together, aggregations…

Read More

Sampling the World’s Rivers

Sampling the World's Rivers

WHOI geochemist Bernhard Peucker-Ehrenbrink and Britta Voss, MIT/WHOI Joint Program student, take water samples from the Fraser River in British Columbia. Peucker-Ehrenbrink and scientist Max Holmes from the Woods Hole…

Read More

On the Wall

On the Wall

A vertical wall of coral defines the outer edge of a coral reef in the Red Sea in this 2008 photo. Individual coral colonies on the wall compete for access…

Read More

Sensitive Creature

Sensitive Creature

Meet the cuttlefish, marine master of disguise. It swims by jet propulsion, has eight arms, great vision, and W-shaped pupils. Cuttlefish, like their relatives octopus and squid, can quickly change…

Read More

Amorous Angels

Amorous Angels

Two shell-less marine snails, captured with a plankton net, mate in a glass dish. These half-inch-long animals are swimming snails called pteropods that live in open ocean waters. This species,…

Read More

A Harvest of Seismometers

A Harvest of Seismometers

Like a sleigh full of pumpkins, an instrument composed of five ocean bottom seismometers (OBS) in orange housings and a broadband seismometer (gray ) rests on deck after on year…

Read More

Floating Snack Bar

Floating Snack Bar

Trailed by gulls hoping for a quick snack, the fishing boat Decisive heads for harbor at Chatham, Mass. Scientists at WHOI’s Marine Policy Center and Woods Hole Sea Grant are…

Read More

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

R/V Knorr doesn’t often sail to the Pacific Ocean, but when it does, it’s memorable. At the tail end of a 2009 expedition to deploy a series of Argo floats…

Read More

Current Knowledge

Current Knowledge

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a natural cycle that recurs over two to seven year periods. When surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific are warmer than usual (El…

Read More

Microscopic Vision

Microscopic Vision

WHOI biologists Robert Olson and Heidi Sosik created the Imaging FlowCytobot, which photographs, identifies, and counts plankton cells in the ocean 24 hours a day for months at a time…

Read More

The First Atlantis

The First Atlantis

Atlantis, the first ship used at WHOI for multidisciplinary ocean research, departed for sea trials after it was built in 1931. The 142-foot, ketch-rigged Atlantis retired from service to the U.S. oceanographic…

Read More

A New Pattern Emerges

A New Pattern Emerges

Regular changes in sea-surface temperature in the Pacific Ocean, such as , such as El Niño and La Niña, influence precipitation and storms over a wide swath of the globe.…

Read More

Icy Outpost

Icy Outpost

Researchers from WHOI and crew from the Canadian icebreaker Louis S. St. Laurent prepare to deploy an ice-tethered micro-mooring (ITM) on a large ice floe in the Canada Basin in…

Read More

Game Changer

Game Changer

In October, WHOI engineers working in Guam made a major breakthrough in remote vehicle technology. Using the hybrid remotely operated vehicle (HROV) Nereus equipped with an optical modem, a team…

Read More

ASIMET animation

(Animation by Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) By Hugh Powell, Jack Cook :: Originally published online March 30, 2007

Read More

Beneath Shark Skin

Beneath Shark Skin

This fall, a fisherman in California caught this four foot-long great white shark and brought it to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, where it died a short time later. The six…

Read More

Elegant Anemone

Elegant Anemone

The half-inch-long starlet anemone, Nematostella vectensis, is a relative of reef-building corals. It lives in salt marshes along the east coast from Canada to Georgia, is easy to grow in…

Read More

High Wire Work

High Wire Work

Electrician Paul Roy, a contractor for WHOI, works via a basket suspended on a crane to adjust a search light mounted on the forward mast of the research vessel Knorr.…

Read More

A Promising Career

A Promising Career

Drew Smith, a junior at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, is spending the fall semester with the Alvin group at WHOI working on several electrical components used on the submersible during…

Read More

Can We Keep It?

Can We Keep It?

WHOI/MIT Joint Program student Alec Bogdanoff (holding line) and Pete Liarikos, bosun on research vessel Knorr, tested a glider named “Boomer” (after a character from the television show Battlestar Galactica) during…

Read More

Bird’s Eye View

Bird's Eye View

This aerial photo of Woods Hole village shows the two large WHOI-operated research vessels, Atlantis, left, and Knorr, right, at the WHOI dock overlooking Great Harbor. Many improvements have been…

Read More

Seal Sightings

Seal Sightings

People come from miles away to see the seals off the shores of Cape Cod, but the animals are creating some challenges for local fishermen. Increasing seal populations led to…

Read More