Lessons from a lifetime of exploration
Award-winning ocean photographer Brian Skerry shares insights from a career spent around ocean life and science
The little big picture
WHOI senior biologist Heidi Sosik on the critical need for long-term ocean datasets
The ocean weather nexus, explained
The vital role of ocean observations in extreme weather forecasting
Breaking down plastics together
Through a surprising and successful partnership, WHOI and Eastman scientists are reinventing what we throw away
Three questions with Carl Hartsfield
Captain Hartsfield, USN retired, discusses the role ocean science plays in our national defense
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The Ocean (Re)Imagined
How expanding our view of the ocean can unlock new possibilities for life
Body snatchers are on the hunt for mud crabs
WHOI biologist Carolyn Tepolt discusses the biological arms race between a parasite and its host
A polar stethoscope
Could the sounds of Antarctica’s ice be a new bellwether for ecosystem health in the South Pole?
Secrets from the blue mud
Microbes survive—and thrive—in caustic fluids venting from the seafloor
Top 5 ocean hitchhikers
As humans traveled and traded across the globe, they became unwitting taxis to marine colonizers
Following the Polar Code
Crew of R/V Neil Armstrong renew their commitment to Arctic science with advanced polar training
Harnessing the ocean to power transportation
WHOI scientists are part of a team working to turn seaweed into biofuel
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Casting a wider net
The future of a time-honored fishing tradition in Vietnam, through the eyes of award-winning photographer Thien Nguyen Noc
Gold mining’s toxic legacy
Mercury pollution in Colombia’s Amazon threatens the Indigenous way of life
How do you solve a problem like Sargassum?
An important yet prolific seaweed with massive blooms worries scientists
Ancient seas, future insights
WHOI scientists study the paleo record to understand how the ocean will look in a warmer climate
Rising tides, resilient spirits
As surrounding seas surge, a coastal village prepares for what lies ahead
Whistle! Chirp! Squeak! What does it mean?
Avatar Alliance Foundation donation helps WHOI researcher decode dolphin communication
We can’t do this alone
For marine chemist Adam Subhas, ocean-climate solutions don’t happen without community
How WHOI helped win World War II
Key innovations that cemented ocean science’s role in national defense
Life at the margins
Scientists investigate the connections between Ghana’s land, air, sea and blue economy through the Ocean Margins Initiative
Continental Margin Particle Flux
The boundaries between the oceans and the continents are dynamic regions for the production, recycling, and deposition of sedimentary particles. In general, rates of biological productivity along continental margins are significantly higher than in the open ocean. This is due to a variety of factors including coastal upwelling of nutrient-rich waters and nutrient input from continental runoff. While continental margins account for only about 10 percent of the global ocean area, 50 percent of the total marine organic carbon production is estimated to occur in this limited region, with much of it exported to the deep sea.
Geochemical Archives Encoded in Deep-Sea Sediments Offer Clues for Reconstructing the Ocean’s Role in Past Climatic Changes
Geochemical Archives Encoded in Deep-Sea Sediments Offer Clues for Reconstructing the Ocean’s Role in Past Climatic Changes
Paleoceanographers are trying to understand the causes and consequences of global climate changes that have occurred in the geological past. One impetus for gaining a better understanding of the factors that have affected global climate in the past is the need to improve our predictive capabilities for future climate changes, possibly induced by the rise of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
Ground-Truthing the Paleoclimate Record
Sediment Trap Observations Aid Paleoceanographers
The geological record contains a wealth of information about Earth’s past environmental conditions. During its long geological history the planet has experienced changes in climate that are much larger than those recorded during human history; these environmental conditions range from periods when large ice sheets covered much of the northern hemisphere, as recently as 20,000 years ago, to past atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that warmed Earth’s polar regions enough to melt all of the ice caps 50 million years ago. Since human civilization has developed during a fairly short period of unusually mild and stable climate, humans have yet to experience the full range of variability that the planet’s natural systems impose. Thus, the geological record has become an extremely important archive for understanding the range of natural variability in climate, the processes that cause climate change on decadal and longer time scales, and the background variability from which greenhouse warming must be detected
Catching the Rain: Sediment Trap Technology
WHOI Senior Engineer Ken Doherty developed the first sediment trap in the late 1970s for what has come to be known as the WHOI PARFLUX (for “particle flux”) group. Working closely with the scientific community, Doherty has continued to improve sediment traps for two decades, and these WHOI-developed instruments are widely used both nationally and internationally in the particle flux research community.
Replacing the Fleet
When R/V Atlantis arrived in Woods Hole for the first time on a bright, beautiful April 1997 day, it represented not only a welcome addition to the WHOI fleet but also the culmination of a 15-year UNOLS fleet modernization.
WHOI and Access to the Sea
In the mid-term future, two WHOI ships (Knorr in about 2006 and Oceanus in about 2009) will reach the end of their planned service lives. There is general agreement that WHOI should work to replace them with two vessels.
A Northern Winter
As the 1996-1997 ship schedule began to take shape in 1995, we learned that Voyage 147 would take R/V Knorr into the North Atlantic from October ’96 through March of ’97. The various science missions would require station keeping during CTD casts, deployment of current drifters, and expendable bathythermograph (XBT) launches, as well as weather system analysis designed to put Knorr in the path of the harshest weather conditions possible during the winter season. Long before the cruise, we began to tap all available assets that would help us with this challenge.
Adventure in the Labrador Sea
The sound of the general alarm bell reverberated through the ship. At 2:30 AM, this couldn’t be a drill. Even more puzzling, we were still dockside in Halifax, four hours from our scheduled departure for the Labrador Sea.
“What a Year!”
Four technologies that have been developing separately for some time were brought together this year by WHOI’s Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL) to serve three very different user communities. With images from the towed vehicle Argo II and the remotely operated vehicle Jason, DSL scientists and engineers created mosaic images of a sunken British cargo ship and 20-meter-tall hydrothermal vent chimneys, both in the Pacific Ocean, and ancient shipwreck sites in the Mediterranean. The three expeditions thus served the marine safety, scientific, and archaeological communities.
Access to the Sea
Oceanographic fieldwork has traditionally meant going to sea on a ship. In recent years, it has expanded to include activities that may require a ship for a short period but then continue independently. Floats that drift with ocean currents, periodically reporting their positions via satellite, for example, are generally launched from ships but do most of their work independently. Long-term seafloor observatories may need ships to set them up and service them occasionally, but, again, they are designed to collect data for long periods without needing a ship. We have come to think of the body of ways oceanographers glean information from the ocean as “access to the sea,” and so that is the topic for this issue of Oceanus.
The Magnetic Thickness of a Recent Submarine Lava Flow
Submarine lava flows and their associated narrow feeder conduits known as dikes constitute the basic building blocks of the upper part of the ocean crust. We are only beginning to understand how lava erupts and forms on the seafloor by flooding topographic lows, flowing through channels or tubes, centralizing into volcanoes, or some combination of all of these.
New Data on Deep Sea Turbulence Shed Light on Vertical Mixing
The global thermohaline circulation is basically a wholesale vertical overturning of the sea, driven by heating and cooling, precipitation and evaporation.