Interview

She’s Got the Whole Fleet in Her Hands

June 4, 2008

For oceanographers, going to sea isn’t as simple as driving to the dock, climbing on board a ship, and motoring away. The process takes an average of two or more…

A Warm Eddy Swirling in the Cold Labrador Sea

September 24, 2007

Amy Bower is traveling to the Labrador Sea to install a mooring with novel carousels that will autonomously release profiling floats into passing warm eddies. She has also forged an innovative outreach partnership with the Perkins School for the Blind, including an expedition Web sight for students with visual impairments.

Summer Under Arctic Ice

July 19, 2007

This month, an international team of scientists and engineers are exploring the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean while cruising aboard the Swedish icebreaker Oden. The science team is sending three…

Following Whales Up a Creek

July 12, 2007

Michael Moore is accustomed to working solo (or nearly so) in remote places, but this was a very public endeavor. The WHOI marine mammal biologist and veterinarian flew across the…

Don Anderson, Holding Back Red Tide

June 29, 2007

JUNE 29, 2007 The ocean is teeming with plants, and most of them are good for marine animals and the planet as a whole. But as with anything in life,…

Christopher Reddy, Marine Chemist

Oil spills are terrible for the environment, but they also provide an excellent opportunity to study how the ocean and its ecosystems respond to extreme events. Most people see a…

Chris German: Searching for Hydrothermal Vents Around the World

June 6, 2007

JUNE 6, 2007 When Chris German first entered his doctoral program at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s, conventional wisdom had it that hydrothermal vents could only exist in…

Of Sons and Ships and Science Cruises

May 31, 2007

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has had an unbroken line of three ships named Atlantis that date to the Institution’s founding in the early 1930s. Arthur D. Colburn III, better…

A Journey to the Ocean’s Twilight Zone

August 16, 2006

You are about to enter another dimension. You’re moving into a place of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; a journey into a wondrous part of the ocean,…

Worlds Apart, But United by the Oceans

May 15, 2006

Jian Lin came of age in an era of both geological and political seismic shifts in China, experiencing the deadliest earthquake in the 20th century in Tangshen in 1976 and the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s. Then he immigrated to America and came full circle in 2005 to become the first U.S. scientist to co-lead a Chinese deep-sea research cruise.

Tracking an Ocean of Ice Atop Greenland

December 15, 2005

Sarah Das calls herself a “frozen oceanographer.” Most people look at Greenland and see a vast ice sheet covering Earth’s largest island. But Das sees a huge reservoir of water—temporarily…

Building an Automated Underwater Microscope

September 9, 2005

A conversation with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution biologist Heidi Sosik about her work studying phytoplankton ecology in the coastal ocean and the new instrument, the Imaging FlowCytobot, that she and biologist Rob Olson developed. Sosik describes the importance of phytoplankton to the food web and ecology of the coastal ocean, and how this new instrument, which will be deployed this summer, represents a breakthrough in year-round monitoring of coastal phytoplankton communities.