Oceanus Online Archive
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
Gone Fish Assessing
Scientists at WHOI are applying new technologies to help the National Marine Fisheries Services assess fish stocks and maintain critical habitats
Read More
Jason Versus the Volcano
Through the camera eyes of the undersea vehicle Jason, scientists were investigating a quietly bubbling pit on the side of a large volcano on the seafloor south of Japan in…
Read More
Chilly Scenes of Winter off Cape Cod
When winter winds began rattling the storm windows last autumn, Andrey Shcherbina and Glen Gawarkiewicz shook the mothballs out of their cold-weather exposure suits and dusted off their sea boots.…
Read More
Ocean Microscope Reveals Surprising Abundance of Life
Towing an underwater video microscope across the Atlantic Ocean, two scientists found unexpected abundances of colonial cyanobacteria that fertilize the oceans with nitrogen. The bacteria may turn out to be…
Read More
New Hybrid Deep-sea Vehicle Is Christened Nereus
Nereus—a mythical god with a fish tail and a man’s torso—was chosen Sunday (June 25) in a nationwide contest as the name of a first-of-its-kind, deep-sea vehicle under construction at…
Read More
Lurking Benignly on the Seafloor, the ‘Yeti’ Crab is Discovered
Biologist Cindy Van Dover routinely finds new, unusual creatures when she dives to unexplored areas of the ocean in the deep-sea submersible Alvin. So she was not particularly fazed when…
Read More
ABE—The Autonomous Benthic Explorer
The pioneering deep-submergence vehicle, now 10 years old, continues to demonstrate its versatility on each new cruise.
Read More
Flying Blind in the Ice Factory
Al Plueddemann wants to push the envelope and fly a robotic vehicle into the wild blue under the polar ice cap. North of Alaska lies a key region for understanding…
Read More
What Is the Alvin Training Program Like?
Like many boys who spend their youths throwing baseballs in Massachusetts parks, Tarantino dreamed of playing for the Red Sox. When not pitching, he liked to take apart his toys…
Read More
Alvin‘s Pilots
Forty summers ago in the Bahamas, two men climbed inside a 23-foot white submarine named Alvin and drove it to a depth 6,000 feet, a dive that certified them as…
Read More
Seafloor Reconnaissance Reveals Hidden Dangers Off Antarctica
For five frigid weeks in April and May 2005, a team of scientists and engineers sat in inflatable boats off the coast of the western Antarctic Peninsula, steering clear of…
Read More
Newest Alvin Pilot Comes Aboard
Gavin Eppard became WHOI?s newest Alvin pilot on March 21, 2005.
Read More
A Glide Across the Gulf Stream
News of the first successful Gulf Stream crossing by a glider last November—and the launching today (Thursday, March 24) of Spray’s seven-week round-trip mission from Bermuda across the Gulf Stream and back—has caused a ripple among scientists, who recall the dream of famed WHOI oceanographer Henry Stommel.
Read More
Robo-Sailors
In the mid-1990s, the Navy began funding research for small, robotic vehicles to perform unmanned reconnaissance in coastal waters. At WHOI, that helped spark the development of REMUS (Remote Environmental Monitoring UnitS), designed and built by Chris von Alt, Ben Allen, and colleagues in the Oceanographic Systems Laboratory.
Read More
Realizing the Dreams of da Vinci and Verne
Leonardo da Vinci made the first drawings of a submarine more than 500 years ago, and Jules Verne published 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1875. But only in the past few decades has the dizzying pace of technological advances allowed us to realize their dreams of exploring the ocean depths and taking humans to the seafloor.
Read More
Unique Vehicles for a Unique Environment
For climatologists and physical oceanographers, it is often said that the Arctic is a canary in the environmental coal mine. In the isolated Arctic Ocean Basin, a variety of oceanographic and other processes have conspired to create a layer of cold, salty water called a halocline, which shields the sea ice from underlying warmer waters that would otherwise melt it.
Read MoreVoyage to Vailulu’u
It was like a pirate’s treasure map. A dotted line clearly showed the trail, but at the end of it, no “X” marked the spot. Then a telltale clue caught…
Read More
“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.
Read More