WHOI in the News
Climate-change clues contained in whaling logbooks kept in the Providence library
Researchers Caroline Ummenhofer and Timothy Walker are searching through information collected on the Isaac Howland and other 18th-, 19th- and early 20th-century whalers to find clues about how global wind patterns are changing.
The Mystery of Why Our Ancestors Left Africa
How might climate variability have shaped H. erectus? The marine geologist and climate scientist Peter de Menocal, the director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, in Massachusetts, has studied changes in climate 1.9 million years ago using layers of sediment buried beneath the ocean floor off the coast of East Africa. He points out that “the period of around 2 million years [ago] is one of the major junctures in human evolution.”
Can we harness the natural power of the ocean to fight climate change?
A top priority for science is to advance our understanding and monitoring of the oceans so that we can measure impacts and viability of these potential solutions. Specifically, this means developing more complete understanding of how the ocean works at this scale, how it cycles carbon from the surface to deep waters, and how the oceans are changing. With this new capability, we can test the effectiveness and impacts of these ocean CDR approaches.
Columbia to Launch $25 Million AI-based Climate Modeling Center
To bring greater precision to climate modeling and encourage societies to prepare for the inevitable disruptions ahead, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Columbia to lead a climate modeling center called Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP). In collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the center will develop the next generation of data-driven physics-based climate models.
Need to Avoid Carbon ‘Gold Rush’ in the Ocean: Peter de Menocal
WHOI president and director Peter de Menocal speaks on the urgency and scale of ocean carbon capture and storage solutions.
WHOI Named As NSF Science And Tech Center
“The basic idea is that we’re trying to understand the molecules and the microbes that are really important for transforming about a quarter of Earth’s photosynthetic carbon every year. That area, that particular pool of carbon, has been really hard to study because it turns over really fast, which means it’s produced and consumed in very short time periods. There’s not much of it at any one point in time, so we have had a very hard time analytically pulling it out of seawater, characterizing it, trying to understand which bacteria or phytoplankton or microbes, in general, are important for controlling it and so on.”
Explorers, Scientists, and Advocates James Cameron, Ray Dalio, Peter de Menocal, and Dr. Edith Widder to Discuss Ocean Twilight Zone for Public Unveiling of Historic Art Installation
The live conversation will feature insights into pushing the boundaries of discovery and seeking solutions to Earth’s most pressing problems, deep in the ocean’s twilight zone.
Explorers, Scientists, and Advocates James Cameron, Ray Dalio, Peter de Menocal, and Dr. Edith Widder to Discuss Ocean Twilight Zone for Public Unveiling of Historic Art Installation
″ Illuminating the Abyss ” will take place on Tuesday, September 21, at 7:30 PM ET. The event will be hosted by renowned ocean research organization Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and moderated by climate reporter and author Tatiana Schlossberg.
Here Come the First Responders … And the Engineers?
“Many of those interactions only occur during the biggest storms, when the surge and the waves inundate land and there’s heavy rainfall,” says Britt Raubenheimer, a coastal oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
‘Mysterious Boxes’ Are Washing Up On Texas Beaches. What Are They?
Similar objects have been found on the opposite side of the Gulf, in Florida, and a bit further south.
Sunlight Exposure for 100 Hours or Less Melts Plastics, Breaks Them Down Into Smaller Soup of New Chemicals
Microplastics are considered a major environmental hazard that is produced from the disintegration of plastics. Sadly, many of them end up in oceans and pollute or contaminate the waters and marine life. Now, a new study shows that long sunlight exposure could break down plastics and transform them into a soup of new chemicals and eliminate the hazards of microplastics.
A Recent Reversal Discovered in the Response of Greenland’s Ice Caps to Climate Change
New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published on September 9, 2021, in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland.
The Right Tools for Right Whales
Lonati’s methodology involves looking for whales, then hovering the university’s dual-gimbal DJI Matrice 210 V2 drone over a whale when it surfaces, capturing high-resolution images using an RGB camera at 20m above the ocean surface, then descending to 10m to capture a reading of the whale’s internal body temperature via its blowhole using an infrared camera. It is worth noting that drones have been deployed by researchers before to gather information about whales.
Mauritius incident was world’s first major spill of very low sulfur fuel oil
“When we analyzed several other Low Sulfur Fuel Oils, we found some contained higher concentrations of toxic components than the oil discharged in the Mauritius spill, so more research will be needed before we can conclude that all the oil types within this new class pose less of a threat to marine ecosystems than heavy fuel oils.”
‘No easy answers’ WHOI building project designed for sea-level rise
“This is critical infrastructure to what we do,” said Rob Munier, WHOI vice president for marine facilities and operations. “Others can contemplate alternatives, including retreat (from the waterfront), but we have to be there. It’s part of our ability to do our mission.”
‘Tiger Stripes’ on a Saturn Moon Could Be Even More Unique Than Previously Thought
Icy moons that have (or are thought to have) subsurface oceans are common in the outer solar system. For example, Jupiter has several of them. These form when gravity from the planet they orbit stretches and squeezes their interior.
Rise and fall of water blisters offers glimpse beneath Greenland’s thick ice sheet
The findings could shed light on how climate change will affect Greenland’s vast frozen interior as the planet warms and surface melting increase.
Exploring the Undiscovered Country: The Deep Ocean
Special equipment is required to visit these extreme depths, which is why less than 5% of this area has been explored and charted.
‘The concept looks fairly solid.’ Researchers test new clay process to kill red tide cells
The process, known as clay flocculation, involves spraying a mixture of clay particles and seawater onto the red tide algae.
WHOI Advancing a Seaweed Solution to Develop New Kelp Strains
Aquaculture already supplies more than half of the world’s seafood consumed by humans, with seaweed totaling 27% of annual global aquaculture tonnage.
Hurricane Bob struck 30 years ago. Scientists unsure how climate change will alter Atlantic hurricanes?
When our time comes, will the Cape and Islands be looking at something a lot bigger and stronger than Bob, or Carol, or the Hurricane of ’38 or even the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635?
Scientists Evaluate the Evidence for an Intensifying Indian Ocean Water Cycle
“Scientific communities need to come together to have discussions about what we can tell from our data, how we can compare apples and oranges, and how we can bring all this information together to have a better understanding of the entire Indian Ocean system,” Ummenhofer says.
Our future is in our hands
It is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the planet and that widespread, rapid changes have already occurred in every region of the globe as a result. The scale and rate of changes are “unprecedented” in relation to the past hundreds to thousands of years. And there are more changes on the way.
Climate change accelerates emperor penguin extinction risk
Extreme events observed through recent satellite records amplified the projected declines from previous studies, researchers said.
