Ocean tech
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.
Unique Vehicles for a Unique Environment
For climatologists and physical oceanographers, it is often said that the Arctic is a canary…
Ears in the Ocean
If you sought to delve into the forces that drive and shape the face of…
Seeding the Seafloor with Observatories
Scientists extend their reach into the deep with pioneering undersea cable networks H2O (Hawaii-2 Observatory)…
Voyage to Vailulu’u
It was like a pirate’s treasure map. A dotted line clearly showed the trail, but…
Seeding the Oceans with Observatories
Ship-borne expeditions have been the dominant means of exploring the oceans in the 20th century.…
A Well Sampled Ocean
Unlike the oceans, the sky is relatively visible and accessible to us. But in the…
NEPTUNE: A Fiber-Optic ‘Telescope’ to Inner Space
NEPTUNE is a proposed system of high-speed fiber- optic submarine cables linking a series of…
Seafloor to Surface to Satellite to Shore
The next great leap in our understanding of the earth-ocean system will require us to…
Plugging the Seafloor with CORKs
Hidden beneath the seafloor throughout most of the world's oceans lies a massive, dynamic plumbing…
Outposts in the Ocean
Oceanographers and climatologists have something in common with politicians and stock market analysts: They are…
New Coastal Observatory Is Born
The Martha's Vineyard Observatory will have sensors mounted on two seafloor nodes, at depths of…
Putting H2O in the Ocean
A major obstacle impeding our ability to understand many of the earth's fundamental, ongoing dynamics--quite…
ALISS in Wonderland
In 1985, Cindy Van Dover, then a graduate student in biology in the MIT/WHOI Joint…
Ocean Seismic Network Seafloor Observatories
Our knowledge of the physical characteristics of Earth’s deep interior is based largely on observations…
A New Way to Catch the Rain
The carbon budget of the upper ocean includes an important loss to the deep ocean…
Replacing the Fleet
When R/V Atlantis arrived in Woods Hole for the first time on a bright, beautiful…
WHOI and Access to the Sea
In the mid-term future, two WHOI ships (Knorr in about 2006 and Oceanus in about…
A Northern Winter
As the 1996-1997 ship schedule began to take shape in 1995, we learned that Voyage…
“What a Year!”
Four technologies that have been developing separately for some time were brought together this year…
Access to the Sea
Oceanographic fieldwork has traditionally meant going to sea on a ship. In recent years, it…
The Magnetic Thickness of a Recent Submarine Lava Flow
Submarine lava flows and their associated narrow feeder conduits known as dikes constitute the basic…
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie…
The ocean weather station idea originated in the early days of radio communications and trans-oceanic…