Multimedia Items

Greenland’s ice sheet is pockmarked with cryoconites, or holes filled with melted water. They form when the Sun melts darker dust and silt on the ice sheet, creating round or irregular…

Science and a full life go hand-in-hand for Rudolf Scheltema and Amélie Scheltema, researchers in the WHOI Biology Department who together have devoted over a century to understanding the invertebrate…

WHOI researchers Daniel Montlucon (left), Liviu Giosan (second from left) and two Inuit guides take a break from extracting sediment cores from a frozen Arctic lake. The research team, led…

Looking like bubbles or smoke rings, these half-inch chains, loops, and spheres are actually common planktonic animals called colonial radiolarians. Each soft shape is hundreds of single-celled animals embedded in…

Colored arrows show two of the major current systems flowing through the North Atlantic, with red representing the warm surface waters of the Gulf Stream, North Atlantic Current, and associated…

WHOI’s newest autonomous underwater vehicle, Sentry, is launched from the research vessel Thomas Thompson in August 2008 during the AUV’s first scientific expedition. The vehicle surveyed and helped pinpoint several…

MIT/WHOI graduate student Melinda Hall—now a research specialist in the WHOI Department of Physical Oceanography—shares a laugh with the late Henry Stommel while collecting samples from a conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) rosette.…

Postdoctoral researcher Justin Ries, working with Anne Cohen and Dan McCorkle in the WHOI Geology and Geophysics Department, grew this tropical pencil urchin (Eucidaris tribuloides) and other marine shell-building animals…

WHOI postdoctoral fellow Chip Breier is working to put a new deep-sea particle sampling device on the remotely operated vehicle Jason to collect samples in hard-to-access places. For example, the…

WHOI coastal geologist Ilya Buynevich, right, and Lithuanian colleague Albertas Bitinas use ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to map ancient surfaces beneath Baltic Sea dunes. They are looking for “paleosols”—old soils buried…

In the fall of 2003, the Arctic Edge science team returned to the Western Arctic Ocean to retrieve and redeploy an array of moorings placed in 2002 to observe one…

A panoply of uncommon stories and specimens passes through Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Computerized Scanning and Imaging Facility. In May 2007, a team of biologists and veterinarians used the facility…

Small crustaceans called mysids, shown here swarming in the ocean, might serve as “canaries in the coal mine” indictating when marine environments are being exposed to chemicals that could affect…

The research vessel Crawford is tied up at the WHOI pier with the wing of a P5 Marlin (P5M) seaplane strapped to its side in 1960. “An attempt was made…

WHOI postdoctoral fellow Mar Nieto-Cid adds seawater to a filtration system in the main laboratory of the research vessel Oceanus during a cruise in the North Atlantic in April 2008. …

An ice axe is an indispensable tool for navigating on ice. Explorers use them to probe the snow ahead to see how deep it is, to stop themselves when sliding…

A helicopter from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Polar Star deploys one of five ocean-bottom hydrophones to record sound waves generated by any earthquakes or eruptions near Vailulu’u. After a…

WHOI staff link up and swim together as part of their small boat safety training course in spring 2008. Scientific and technical staff who wish to pilot the Institution’s small…

Ellen Murphy, a high school student from Minnesota, and Chris Reddy, WHOI marine chemist, examine samples of plastic in Reddy’s laboratory in May 2008. Murphy, Reddy, and other lab technicians…