Multimedia Items

On October 16, 1968, at the beginning of Dive 308, two steel cables supporting Alvin‘s lowering cage parted. The sub plunged about 15 feet (4.5 meters), then bobbed to the…

In March 2011 one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded shook Japan, creating a tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and resulted in the largest unintentional release…

In August 2014, R/V Knorr transited through Prince Christian Sound, a 60-mile (100-kilometer) strait in southern Greenland that narrows in places to only 1,500 feet (500 meters). The sound connects the…

This stealthy-looking vehicle is a VPR, or Video Plankton Recorder, which images plankton and particles as it is towed through the water while software on the ship automatically identifies the organisms…

At an open house that she hosted in the WHOI Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) Laboratory, scientist Claudia Cenedese invited visitors to have their portrait taken with a thermal-imaging camera, which…

The Mesocosm Lab at WHOI is a unique facility that gives scientists the ability to set up realistic natural environments, but on a smaller scale. An underground system draws seawater…

Exhibit preparator Sean Murtha installs a new exhibit at the  Ocean Science Exhibit Center entitled The Deep Sea. The exhibit was orginally displayed at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., and replicates…

Chen Cai, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis organizes one of the 16 seismic stations that a team led partly by WHOI geophysicist Ralph Stephen set up…

A rock sample, collected from the Central Indian Ridge, a mountain chain running through the Indian Ocean, sparkles with information. It’s interior is lined with a fine-grained mineral called chalcopyrite as…

In WHOI’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFD), scientists study small versions of ocean currents, eddies, and flows. Scientist Claudia Cenedese and graduate students in the Physical Oceanography Department held public…

MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Jessie Pearl led a team into the Acushnet Cedar Swamp State Reservation in New Bedford, Mass., recently in search of white cedar trees from which…

Ocean plankton ranges in size from tiny plant-like cells to gelatinous animals that can be almost as long as a bus but with soft, jelly-like bodies. This comb jelly, Ocyropsis…

It was -22°F in March 2014 when WHOI engineers Kris Newhall (left) and John Kemp landed in a Twin Otter aircraft on an ice floe in the Beaufort Sea. They were…

Porpita porpita, also called the blue button jelly, floats at or near the surface of the water and drifts with the wind. This flower-like floater, related to jellyfish, is actually…

The original personnel sphere of the human-occupied vehicle Alvin was shaped from a steel plate in 1964 at Lukens Steel Co. in Coatesville, Pennsylvania. That sphere was used until 1973, when engineers…

A bust of Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd stands on the deck of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic headquarters before the flags of the original Antarctic Treaty nations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France,…