Oceanus Magazine - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Launching the Argo Armada

The Argo program proposes to disperse 3,000 floats, like the one below, throughout the oceans to collect data on oceanic conditions that can be periodically transmitted to shore via satellite.

Ocean Tech

Putting H2O in the Ocean

A major obstacle impeding our ability to understand many of the earth’s fundamental, ongoing dynamics–quite frankly–has been a dearth of electrical outlets and phone jacks on the seafloor.

How the Ocean Works

The gentle lapping of waves on the beach is a metaphor for enduring tranquility. However, the thin zone where the surf meets the turf is one of the most turbulent, complex, fast-moving, constantly changing places on Earth.

How the Ocean Works

ALISS in Wonderland

In 1985, Cindy Van Dover, then a graduate student in biology in the MIT/WHOI Joint Program, discovered a novel light-sensing organ on a unique species of shrimp that lives at high-temperature, black smoker chimneys on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. If this photoreceptor were indeed some sort of primitive “eye,” the question instantly arose: At depths of some 3,600 meters, where sunlight cannot penetrate, what are these shrimp looking at? The search for a source of light in deep-sea hydrothermal environments began.

How the Ocean Works

How to Build a Black Smoker Chimney

Diving along the mid-ocean ridge at 21°N on the East Pacific Rise, scientists within the deep submersible Alvin peered through their tiny portholes two decades ago to see an astonishing sight: Clouds of billowing black “smoke” rising rapidly from the tops of tall rocky “chimneys.”

How the Ocean Works

Hitting the Hotspots

The great volcanic mid-ocean ridge system stretches continuously around the globe for 60,000 kilometers, nearly all of it hidden beneath the world’s oceans.

How the Ocean Works

Life on the Seafloor and Elsewhere in the Solar System

The RIDGE program (Ridge Inter-Disciplinary Globe Experiments) was sharply focused on the global spreading center system, but the program’s goals were broadly defined. RIDGE was designed to explore the causes, consequences, and linkages associated with the physical, chemical, and biological processes that transfer mass and energy from the interior to the surface of the planet along the mid-ocean ridges.

Ocean Life

Deep-Sea Diaspora

When spectacular biological communities were first discovered at hydrothermal vents in 1977, biologists puzzled over two main questions: How did these oases of large and abundant animals persist in the deep sea, where food is typically scarce? And how did these unusual species, which occur only at vents, manage to colonize new vents and avoid extinction when old vents shut down?

How the Ocean Works

The Cauldron Beneath the Seafloor

Just over 20 years ago, scientists exploring the mid-ocean ridge system first made the spectacular discovery of black smokers—hydrothermal chimneys made of metal sulfide minerals that vigorously discharge hot, dark, particulate-laden fluids into the ocean.

Ocean Tech

“Nothing Could Diminish the Excitement Of Seeing the Animals for the First Time”

The scientists who made the surprising discovery of teeming life around hydrothermal vents of the Galápagos Rift in 1977 were geologists and geochemists. They had not expected to find spectacular colonies of previously unknown, large animals on the deep seafloor.

How the Ocean Works

The Big MELT

More than 95 percent of the earth’s volcanic magma is generated beneath the seafloor at mid-ocean ridges.

How the Ocean Works

Mid-Atlantic Ridge Volcanic Processes

Long before the plate-tectonic revolution began in the 1960s, scientists envisioned drilling into the ocean crust to investigate Earth’s evolution.

How the Ocean Works

Indian Ocean’s Atlantis Bank Yields Deep-Earth Insight

I never imagined I would spend six weeks of my life “wandering around” the seafloor exploring an 11 million year old beach, and it never occurred to me to look for a fossil island. But that’s what I did, and that’s what we found on two research voyages separated by more than a decade.

How the Ocean Works

Melt Extraction from the Mantle Beneath Mid-Ocean Ridges

As the oceanic plates move apart at mid-ocean ridges, rocks from Earth’s mantle, far below, rise to fill the void, mostly via slow plastic flow.

How the Ocean Works

Exploring The Global Mid-Ocean Ridge

There is a natural tendency in scientific investigations for increased specialization. Most important advances are made by narrowing focus and building on the broad foundation of earlier, more general research.

How the Ocean Works

Discovery of “Megamullions” Reveals Gateways Into the Ocean Crust and Upper Mantle

urposes. From the end of the nineteenth into the first half of the twentieth century, drilling was used to penetrate the reef and uppermost volcanic foundation of several oceanic islands, and these glimpses of oceanic geology whetted the scientific community’s appetite for deeper and more complete data.

Ocean & Human Lives

Ocean Seismic Network Seafloor Observatories

Our knowledge of the physical characteristics of Earth’s deep interior is based largely on observations of surface vibrations that occur after large earthquakes. Using the same techniques as CAT (Computer Aided Tomography) scans in medical imaging, seismologists can “image” the interior of our planet. But just as medical imaging requires sensors that surround the patient, seismic imaging requires sensors surrounding the earth.

Ocean & Human Lives

The Women of FAMOUS

My FAMOUS story begins during my first year in graduate school at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.

How the Ocean Works

A Current Affair

oal of probing the earth’s inaccessible deep interior. But the technique remains something of a mystery even to many marine scientists. It has been used widely on land, particularly for regional-scale surveys, but only a few full-scale MT surveys have been carried out on the seafloor.

How the Ocean Works

The Oceanic Flux Program

The predawn hours at sea have a unique feel—an eerie stillness, regardless of weather. This morning is no exception as the Bermuda Biological Station’s R/V Weatherbird II approaches the OFP (Oceanic Flux Program) sediment trap mooring some 75 kilometers southeast of Bermuda.

Ocean Life

Marine Snow and Fecal Pellets

Until about 130 years ago, scholars believed that no life could exist in the deep ocean. The abyss was simply too dark and cold to sustain life. The discovery of many animals living in the abyssal environment by Sir Charles Wyville Thompson during HMS Challenger’s 1872-1876 circumnavigation stunned the late 19th century scientific community far more than we can now imagine.

How the Ocean Works

Extreme Trapping

One of oceanography’s major challenges is collection of data from extraordinarily difficult environments. For those who use sediments traps, two examples of difficult environments are the deepest oceans and the permanently ice-covered Arctic Basin.

How the Ocean Works

The Rain of Ocean Particles and Earth’s Carbon Cycle

WHOI Phytoplankton photosynthesis has provided Earth’s inhabitants with oxygen since early life began. Without this process the atmosphere would consist of carbon dioxide (CO2) plus a small amount of nitrogen, the atmospheric pressure would be 60 times higher than the air we breathe, and the planet’s air temperatures would hover around 300°C. (Conditions similar to these are found on Earth’s close sibling Venus.

How the Ocean Works