Multimedia Items

This curious, colorful image may look a little like five bananas, but it is actually a spectrogram of sound waves recorded by a hydrophone in the ocean. More particularly, it…

WHOI scientist Rocky Geyer collects a water sample in the South River in Marshfield, Mass., to analyze the amount of suspended sediments in it. There won’t be much on a…

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…

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…

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist Anne Cohen (left) and Nathan Mollica, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, extract core samples from a giant Porites coral in Risong Bay, Palau. They and WHOI scientist Weifu Guo were…

Laura Weber, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, teaches middle and high school students of the U.S. Virgin Islands about the role of microorganisms in the health and…

These marine snails are also called “sea butterflies” because of their winglike swimming appendages. Masses of pteropods drift with currents in the open ocean, where they provide food for fish…

The Red Sea has a number of curious characteristics that are not seen in other oceans. It is extremely warm, surface waters often reach over 86° Fahrenheit, and the waters evaporate…

Green tide, Qingdao, Dongyan Liu (Photo courtesy of Don Anderson, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

AUV Orpheus operations on board M/V Alucia during OCEANX cruise to the monuments. (Photo by Tim Shank, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are embarking on a long-term study of marine microplastics to answer a litany of questions, including how larger plastics break down into tiny…

Tim Shank and Luis Lamar inside the Nadir submersible during the OCEANX cruise on board Alucia. (Photo by Ken Kostel, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Bluefin tuna are the largest of all tuna species—adults can reach ten feet in length and weigh more than a thousand pounds. But they start out small, as 2- to…

Members of a 1947-48 cruise row back to the R/V Atlantis (visible in the background). The primary purpose of the six-month “Med Cruise” was to prepare bathymetric charts of the Agean…

The WHOI research vessels Crawford, Atlantis, and Gosnold (left to right) were all in Woods Hole, Mass., on this warm day in 1963. The Crawford, a 125-foot Coast Guard cutter acquired…

This shrimp was collected this summer on a WHOI-led cruise to the Northwestern Atlantic aboard the NOAA research vessel Henry B. Bigelow. The expedition was WHOI’s first to focus on…

It’s a simple fact of life in the ocean that there are more small marine animals than large ones, but that it’s easier to tag a large animal than a…

A coastal surface mooring lies beneath the A-frame on the research vessel Neil Armstrong, while two instrumented anchor frames sit next to the gangway waiting to be loaded aboard. The…