Oceanus Online Archive
Two Ships Passing Passengers in the Night
Into the frigid darkness, following two days of stormy weather, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s coastal research vessel Tioga left port shortly after 10 p.m. on March 6, with sea spray…
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Current Events off Antarctica
The scientific method can divert researchers down curious pathways. Human psychologists study mouse brains. Astrophysicists look for cosmic particles deep in mine shafts. Taxonomists trace bird evolution by studying feather…
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Dead Corals Do Tell Tales
Sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, a tiny drifting larva found the perfect piece of real estate to settle down, on the shallow seafloor off the island of…
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Follow the Carbon Trail
Carbon makes the world go around. It is the building block of life on Earth, and in the form of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere, it has a powerful…
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Young Pup Teaches an Old Robot New Tricks
Mike Jakuba was still a year away from being born when scientists found vents on the seafloor that gushed hot, mineral-rich fluids and were surrounded by bizarre life forms thriving…
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Would a Hagfish By Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?
It’s not hard to figure out how hagfish got their name, since they aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy. Slithery, skinny, coated in gooey slime, and often found wriggling and eating…
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Why the West Wind Wobbles
Winds and temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere vary from month to month and year to year in countless ways. Decades of monitoring the weather and climate have revealed a few simple…
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Reaching Up Into Perilous, Icy Waters
A year had passed since we deployed our mooring in the western Arctic Ocean, which is a long time to ponder the fate of an instrument in a stormy and…
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A Mooring Built to Survive the Irminger Sea
The 330-foot Royal Research Ship James Clark Ross heaved in 20-foot seas southeast of Greenland. Chief Scientist Bob Pickart and I were aft on the main deck, observing our recently…
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Deep-sea Tubeworms Get Versatile ‘Inside’ Help
Cross sections of the tubeworm Riftia pachyptila. (Courtesy of Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education) When scientists found lush thickets of 6-foot-tall, red-tipped tubeworms on the seafloor in 1977, they…
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Sunspots, Sea Changes, and Climate Shifts
Natural materials such as shells, ice, corals, and tree rings contain clues to help scientists piece together how our oceans, atmosphere, and land have changed in the past. The history…
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Lakes and Climates Have Their Ups and Downs
Between 5,400 and 3,000 years ago, something happened to New England’s climate. The region became drier. Water levels in lakes dropped. Several droughts persisted for hundreds of years, changing the…
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How Long Can the Ocean Slow Global Warming?
It is 4:30 a.m., far from land. A group of scientists clad in bright yellow foul-weather gear gathers in the open bay of a research ship. They wait in the…
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Ocean Circulation and a Clam Far From Home
In my first year of graduate school, I was stumped by a big question on my final exam in biological oceanography. Maybe I had missed the relevant lecture or an…
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The Once and Future Circulation of the Ocean
The short history of modern oceanographic observations—less than a century’s worth, really—doesn’t give us a long track record to evaluate how the ocean’s circulation has operated and changed in the…
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A Rare Glimpse Into the Ocean’s Crust
About one and a half million years ago, a great hidden piece of the ocean’s crust uplifted and rotated, giving Clare Williams a window and a time machine into Earth’s…
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What Other Tales Can Coral Skeletons Tell?
In 2003, we traveled by ship to the New England Seamounts—a chain of extinct, undersea volcanoes about 500 miles off the East Coast of North America—to help collect dead corals…
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The Coral-Climate Connection
Are the climate changes we perceive today just part of the Earth system’s natural variability, or are they new phenomena brought about by human activities? One way to find out…
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Students Visit the Deep-sea Robot They Named
Seven students from a California high school took a field trip to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in September, after they submitted the winning entry in a nationwide contest to name…
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Lessons from the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will convene two special conferences this fall to learn from the devastating 2004 tsunami that left more than 220,000 people dead or missing. In July, another…
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WHOI Creates Office to Encourage Applied Oceanography
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has established a new Office for Applied Oceanography to foster applied research supported by sources beyond traditional governmental agencies. To sustain growth in an era of…
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WHOI Scientists Provide Congressional Testimony
Susan Humphris, chair of the Geology and Geophysics Department, testified May 4, 2006, before the House Committee on Resources, one of several WHOI scientists to appear this spring before members…
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Engineers Honored for Pioneering Undersea Robot
The engineering team at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution that built the first fiber-optically cabled deep-sea robot Jason Jr. received the GlobalSpec Great Moments in Engineering award July 14, 2006—on the…
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