Press Room
WHOI research vessels are exploring the oceans this spring from Bermuda to the Bay of Fundy in the North Atlantic and from Mexico to the Galápagos Islands in the eastern Pacific, conducting studies related to climate change, harmful algal blooms,…
Layers of salty ocean water mix with layers of fresher water, creating a salty staircase or layering driven by small-scale convection known as salt fingers. Although scientists have known about salt fingers since 1960, when they were discovered at the…
Scientists, natural resource managers and students from four continents will gather at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) April 21 and 22 to discuss a growing global problem: the sea squirt. The mysterious filter feeding organism, a didemnid also known…
Corals from Papua New Guinea and Barbados indicate that changes in sea level, one of the key indexes for global climate change, may have been more frequent in the past than previously thought, according to a report in today’s issue…
A former Oceanographer of the Navy and Rear Admiral who headed Marine Operations at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) for 14 years has been honored by the Institution with the establishment of the Rear Admiral Richard F. Pittenger, USN…
Scientists have long debated what causes glacial/interglacial cycles, which have occurred most recently at intervals of about 100,000 years. A new study reported in the March 24 issue of Nature finds that these glacial cycles are paced by variations in…
Elephants learn to imitate sounds that are not typical of their species, the first known example after humans of vocal learning in a non-primate terrestrial mammal.
A small autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, named Spray was launched yesterday about 12 miles southeast of Bermuda. The two-meter-(6-foot)-long orange glider with a four-foot wingspan will slowly make its way northwest, crossing the Gulf Stream and reaching the continental…
Predicting when large earthquakes might occur may be a step closer to reality, thanks to a new study of undersea earthquakes in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The study, reported in today??A’s Nature, is the first to suggest that small seismic shocks or foreshocks preceding a major earthquake can be used in some cases to predict the main tremors.
Scientists from WHOI and USGS Menlo Park will be assessing future earthquake risk in Algeria and training Algerian researchers under a new two-year project funded by the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) of the United States Agency for International…
WHOI researchers and colleagues from other laboratories will be able to look at mud from the seafloor in a new way, thanks to a high-tech scanner capable of making rapid, non-destructive, ultra-high-resolution analyses of sediment cores from the seafloor around…
In a lush stand of mangroves on the Pacific coast of Panama, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) biologist is looking for encrusting barnacles and oysters, common on the roots of mangroves in one stand but nearly absent in a…
CONTACTS Monte Basgall (919) 681-8057 monte.basgall@duke.edu Shelley Dawicki (508) 289-2270 sdawicki@whoi.edu DURHAM, N.C. — A team of geologists from Duke University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has discovered a grinding, coordinated ballet of crustal “microplates” unfolding below the equatorial east…
Chemicals found in whale blubber, and initially suspected of being from industrial sources, have turned out to be naturally occurring, raising questions about the accumulation of both natural and industrial compounds in marine life.
A dozen major earthquakes of magnitude 7.0 or greater have occurred in the Caribbean near Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in the past 500 years, and several…
A physical oceanographer known for his theories of wind driven ocean circulation and the fluid dynamics of the oceans will receive the 2005 Sverdrup Gold Medal from the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the nation’s leading professional society for scientists in the atmospheric and related sciences, in ceremonies January 12 at the AMS annual meeting in San Diego.
The Institution will celebrate its 75th anniversary in 2005 with a series of activities ranging from an Anything-But-a-Boat Regatta in August to a public open house and science symposium in September. Speakers from 15 institutions and agencies will address six…
Scientists from the Chilean Navy Hydrographic and Oceanographic Office (SHOA), in cooperation with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), deployed a SHOA tsunami warning buoy off Northern Chile in the Pacific in December 2004 just prior to the devastating Indian…
With decades of experience designing, building and operating marine observing systems of many types around the world, the Institution has established a Center for Ocean, Seafloor and Marine Observing Systems (COSMOS) to provide administrative, management and systems engineering oversight of…
Woods Hole, MA–In a study published in the December 24, 2004 issue of the journal Science, Michael Moore and Greg Early at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have documented bone lesions in the rib and chevron bones of sperm…