Oceanus Magazine - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

WHOI Engineer Turns Author

Scientists Use “ESP” to Track Harmful Algae

Researchers in biologist Don Anderson’s lab are celebrating a new arrival—a gleaming, 3-foot-high robotic instrument that promises to revolutionize how scientists detect and study the ocean’s tiny but troublesome inhabitants: […]

Ocean Life

Are Whales ‘Shouting’ to be Heard?

When we’re talking with friends and a truck rumbles by or someone cranks up the radio, we talk louder. Now scientists have found that North Atlantic right whales do the […]

Ocean Life

Microbes Hitch Rides on Plastics in the Sea

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and the International Census of Marine Microbes initiative.

How the Ocean Works

The Icebot

Ocean Life

Volunteer Gets an Oceanful of Experience

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–> It’s two in the morning, and I’m watching a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, explore previously unseen areas of the seafloor off Indonesia. In real time, I watch a […]

Ocean Tech

Scientists Find that Squid Can Detect Sounds

The ordinary squid, Loligo pealii, is well known as a kind of floating buffet.

“Almost every type of marine organism feeds somehow off squid,” said biologist T. Aran Mooney, a postdoctoral […]

Ocean Tech

Will More Acidic Oceans Be Noisier?

In 2008, a group of marine chemists raised a red flag: As the ocean becomes more acidic over the next century, they said, noise from ships will be able to […]

How the Ocean Works

How Does Toxic Mercury Get into Fish?

Most everyone has heard by now that we should limit our consumption of certain fish because they accumulate high levels of toxic mercury. But nobody—not even scientists—knows how that toxic […]

Ocean & Human Lives

Tracking a Trail of Oil Droplets

In the days after oil began gushing from the Deepwater Horizon well, scientists sought quick information on where the oil was traveling in the depths and how it might be […]

How the Ocean Works

Cold-water Diving

Ocean Tech

A Titanic Tale

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In June of 1985, news came that Bob Ballard aboard the research vessel Knorr had found the RMS Titanic. Almost immediately, the rumors started that an expedition from Woods Hole […]

Boy Scouts Get a Taste of Oceanography

WHOI engineer Paul Fucile took some time off this summer to volunteer at this year’s Boy Scout National Jamboree and give a glimpse of ocean research to boys who had […]

Ocean & Human Lives

Plastic Particles Permeate the Atlantic

Recent reports of a “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the subtropical waters of the North Pacific Ocean described a floating island as large as Texas—so thick that one could potentially […]

Ocean Life

Salps Catch the Ocean’s Tiniest Organisms

Salps are sometimes called “the ocean’s vacuum cleaners.” The soft, barrel-shaped, transparent animals take in water at one end, filter out tiny plants and animals to eat with internal nets […]

Ocean Tech

Alvin Gets an Interior Re-design

For more than four decades, scientists have foregone a few creature comforts to see animals, or volcanoes, or shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea.

On a typical dive in the […]

Ocean Tech

A ‘WHOI Way’ of Doing Things

People who have worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution know it in their bones. People who work with WHOI feel it, too: There’s a WHOI culture, a WHOI way of […]

Ocean Life

A Torrent of Crabs Running to the Sea

Joanna Gyory’s Ph.D. plans changed completely when she saw the crabs. It was her third or fourth day at the Liquid Jungle Lab, a research facility on an undeveloped island […]

Climate & Weather

Science in Service to the Nation

In 1863, as the Civil War raged, Congress established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an honorary society of scholars that any government department could call upon to “investigate, examine, […]

Ocean Tech

The Call of the Sea

Marshall Swartz’s lab is a Santa’s workshop of engineering gadgetry. Computer keyboards and circuit boards spill from cardboard boxes. Cables, wires, and an assortment of tools hang from wall hooks. […]

Ocean Tech

Basic Sea Cable Gets a High-tech Upgrade

In April, when the Deepwater Horizon petroleum drilling rig exploded and oil began gushing from a drill hole almost a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and engineers […]

How the Ocean Works

No Day at the Beach

Field research in oceanography is no day at the beach—even when it’s at the beach. Just ask the students who spent last summer doing research on a swash zone near Seattle.

The […]

Ocean Tech