WHOI in the News
A Critical Ocean Current Is Speeding Up, With Potential Global Consequences
A deadly disease is wiping out coral in Florida and the Caribbean
Researchers are racing to stop stony coral tissue loss disease, which is killing some of the region’s oldest and largest corals.
WHOI Receives Grant for Curious Robot to Study Coral Reef Ecosystems
The team led by WHOI computer scientist Yogesh Girdhar aims to build a robot capable of navigating a reef ecosystem and measuring the biomass, biodiversity, and behavior of organisms living in or passing through a reef over extended periods of time.
Arctic researchers want to state their case before international climate change policy makers
With the Arctic region warming at three times the global rate, profound and rapid change is evident everywhere from the Greenland ice sheet to the ocean ecosystem and the permafrost underlying much of the landmass.
A new ‘blue tech’ lab is coming to MITRE in Bedford
Symposium To Give Residents An Inside Look At Impacts Of Climate Change In Woods Hole
The upcoming symposium is the second in a multi-phased series and will build upon previous assessments of potential impacts of sea-level rise and coastal storms that were introduced during the September 2020 event “Rising Tides: Phase I.”
What Whale Barnacles Know
For generations, these hitchhikers have been recording details about their hosts and their ocean home.
Mysterious rubber bales found along the Texas coast could be from WWII
The objects have been found on the opposite side of the Gulf, too, over in Florida and a bit further to the South.
Scientists Bug STJ Coral Reefs
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
″ 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.