Oceanus Online Archive
Of Wings, Waves, and Winds
“Great albatross! The meanest birds Spring up and flit away, While thou must toil to gain a flight, And spread those pinions grey; But when they once are fairly poised,…
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When ‘The Fish Are Biting’ Is Bad News
<!– –> Among the odds and ends in Rick Trask’s office is the tip of a swordfish bill, mounted on a piece of wood and displayed on the windowsill. For…
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Where the Food Is in the Sea, and Why
When you’re on a boat 50 miles south of Cape Cod on a calm day, the water around you may look flat and relatively featureless. A few hundred feet below,…
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After the Oil Spill, Finding a Drop in the Ocean
In the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in April, marine chemist Elizabeth Kujawinski recognized that a technique she had developed for entirely different reasons could readily be adapted to…
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Exploring the Arctic in the Midst of Change
Chief Scientist Bob Pickart and his 26-member science team were in the hangar at the Barrow Air Search and Rescue Station, waiting for the helicopter. An Inupiat community barnacled to…
Read MoreStanley Watson
Biologist, businessman, benefactor (Courtesy of WHOI Archives) Institutional buildings are usually named after a person for one of two reasons: The namesake has achieved great things on behalf of the…
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Recycling Rare, Essential Nutrients in the Sea
In the vast ocean where an essential nutrient—iron—is scarce, a marine bacterium that launches the ocean food web survives by using a remarkable biochemical trick: It recycles iron. By day,…
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A Hunt for Unusual Seafloor Animals and Vents
The first expedition to search for deep-sea hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise deep in the Caribbean Sea turned up a bonanza. Scientists found evidence for three active vent sites,…
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What’s Living in the Ocean?
In 2010, as the United States conducted its latest decadal population census, marine scientists completed their first census to discover the abundance, diversity, and distribution of organisms living in Earth’s…
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Building Them Tough, Bringing Them Back
Fifty years ago, on Dec. 11, 1960, a group of scientists, engineers, and technicians from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution set a doughnut-shaped buoy into the waters off Bermuda. Anchored by…
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New Ways to Analyze Ocean Imagery
<!– –> Moore Foundation grant sparks ocean informatics initiative Over the past decade, ocean scientists have built underwater systems that have greatly expanded their capacity to collect images from under…
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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:…
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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…
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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.
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Volunteer Gets an Oceanful of Experience
<!– –> 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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