Multimedia Items

The world ocean circulates like a conveyor belt, with cold, salty, dense water in the North Atlantic sinking beneath the surface. But one question remains a mystery: How do […]

MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Laura Stevens marks the location of a buried geophone in Botswana along the East African Rift, where two pieces of Earth’s crust are separating, […]

R/V Knorr Bosun Peter Liarikos and Shipboard Scientific Services Group technician Amy Simoneau release a catch of rock specimens collected with a dredge near the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Scientists on […]

A bucket of ice-cold water is the traditional greeting for people returning from their first dive in the submersible Alvin. Here, WHOI data manager Scott McCue is ritually doused […]

Scientists have long thought that new ocean crust was only formed at spreading centers, where tectonic plates separate and allow magma to emerge from below. WHOI geophysicist Dan […]

Data from a Nortek DW Aquadopp current monitor is downloaded and analyzed after the instrument spent two years in the Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland, where important subsurface currents cross […]

In 1948, a crowd gathered as the original research vessel Atlantis set sail from Cape Cod for a journey to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, part of a long chain of […]

Crew aboard the R/V Atlantis recover an ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) during a January 2009 expedition. The sensitive instruments are deployed on the seafloor to record ground movements from […]

WHOI geologist and earthquake expert Jian Lin arrived on New Zealand’s South Island two days after the deadly 6.3 magnitude earthquake struck that region on Feb. 22. Lin […]

In April 2010, the deep submersible Alvin (shown here with its support ship, R/V Atlantis in the background) carried out a month-long expedition to to the Galapagos Spreading […]

The R/V Atlantis works off the coast of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) in the southeastern Pacific Ocean during a 1998 research expedition. During the cruise, researchers used the submersible […]

The Human Occupied Vehicle Alvin and the R/V Atlantis work in the waters off Galapagos Islands in April 2010 during the Galapagos Ridge Undersea Volcanic Eruptions Expedition […]

Atlantis—the first Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research vessel—departs the dock in July of 1947. This early cruise to Bikini Atoll yielded sediment cores from Henry Stetson’s coring device, […]

The French submersible Cyana is launched into the North Atlantic in 1974 as part of the French-American Mid-Ocean Undersea Study (Project FAMOUS). The submersible—together with the WHOI-operated Alvin […]