Oceanus Online Archive
Stanley 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…
Read MoreRecycling 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,…
Read MoreA 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,…
Read MoreWhat’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…
Read MoreBuilding 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…
Read MoreNew 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…
Read MoreScientists 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:…
Read MoreAre 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…
Read MoreMicrobes 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.
Read MoreVolunteer 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…
Read MoreScientists 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…
Read MoreWill 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…
Read MoreHow 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…
Read MoreTracking 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…
Read MoreA 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…
Read MoreBoy 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…
Read MorePlastic 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…
Read MoreSalps 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…
Read MoreAlvin 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…
Read MoreA ‘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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