Oceanus Online Archive
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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A Titanic Tale
<!– –> 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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.…
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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…
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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.…
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ROV Jason Images the Discovery of the Deepest Explosive Eruption on the Sea Floor
<!– –> West Mata Eruption, 2009 Courtesy NSF, NOAA, and WHOI Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab
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A Glacier’s Pace
Time was, saying something moved “at a glacier’s pace” meant it was grindingly slow. No longer. Glaciers don’t move like that anymore. Since the early 1990s, glaciers in Greenland have…
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Lessons from the Haiti Earthquake
When I was a boy growing up in China, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake near the city of Tangshan killed more than 242,000 people and severely injured 170,000 more. More than 7,000…
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New Head of WHOI Fleet Comes Aboard
<!– –> Sometimes, a career change has the feel of deferred destiny. “I was in the Caribbean,” said Rob Munier, “at Grand Cayman Island, doing graduate work in the mid-1970s,…
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A Robot Is Resurrected at Sea
Barely a month after the undersea robot ABE imploded and was lost in the depths, ABE’s “son,” Sentry, suffered fire and flooding that destroyed critical internal components. But a team…
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Undersea Asphalt Volcanoes Discovered
The dome-like mounds poking up in sonar maps of the seafloor caught scientists’ eyes. They stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding environment off the coast of Santa Barbara,…
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How to Survive a Tsunami
In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that devastated villages and cost 230,000 lives, WHOI geophysicist Jian Lin saw a need for an easy-to-use Web resource…
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Scuba Gear and Origami
Terry Rioux has lived the life aquatic. He took a scuba diving course in college in 1967 and has been diving ever since. He’s lost track of how many dives…
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Mysteries at High Latitudes
We were watching waves, Kjetil Våge and I, from the open transom on the research vessel Knorr. It was mid-October 2008 in the Irminger Sea, where nautical standards are different.…
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