WHOI in the News
Breaking the ice on melting and freezing
“Ice deforms as it melts,” said WHOI physical oceanographer Claudia Cenedese, who has worked with Hester on the project. “It makes these very weird shapes, especially on the bottom, like the way the wind shapes a mountain on a longer time scale.”
The Battle Below
In late September, President Trump declared the U.S. dependence on China for so-called ‘rare earth’ minerals a ‘national emergency’. Those minerals are essential to technology from our phones to our top-level defense weapons. In today’s cover story, Lisa Fletcher takes us on a deep dive, literally, beneath the earth’s surface into the ocean for ‘the battle below.’
Massachusetts Organizations Honored for Efforts to Expand Adoption of Electric Vehicles in the Commonwealth
A diverse group of companies and higher education institutions from across Massachusetts have been recognized for steps they have taken to expand the use of electric vehicles (EVs) in their communities and across the state.
Long-running plankton study to resume off of Maine
A long-running study of tiny organisms off New England is set to resume due to an agreement between scientific organizations. The survey, which originally ran from 1961 to 2017, will resume because of an agreement between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, England.
Ancient storms could help predict future shifts in tropical cyclone hotspots
To get a better sense of how climate change might alter the patterns of major ocean storms, shifting the parameters of tropical cyclone hotspots, scientists reconstructed 3,000-years of storm history in the Marshall Islands.
Remembering one of history’s greatest whale explosions
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the infamous Florence whale explosion. While methods for dealing with dead whales have improved since the ’70s, the giant mammals do explode from time to time—no pyrotechnics needed. “The risk of a spontaneous explosion is always there with a decomposing whale,” says Michael Moore, a senior scientist at WHOI.
Citizen science vital to cyanobacteria bloom research
“We have many parts of the country with huge coastlines like Maine and California and we’re finding it really difficult to monitor for multiple toxins threatening people and ecosystems,” said Don Anderson, a senior scientist at WHOI and a principal investigator at the Woods Hole Center for Oceans and Human Health.
Acoustics of the deep sea tell us about biodiversity
Some researchers are working to improve current listening technology. At the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Ying-Tsong Lin is building a starfish-shaped contraption of hydrophones that can tune into certain sounds hundreds of miles away, like a telescope for sound.
Could Listening to the Deep Help Save it?
Some researchers are working to improve listening technology. At WHOI, Ying-Tsong Lin is building a starfish-shaped contraption of hydrophones that can tune into certain sounds hundreds of miles away, like a telescope for sound.
Mauritius oil spill: fears for island’s marine life after initial tests fail to resolve fuel mystery
Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) said the first ultra-high-resolution analysis of an oil sample from the Mauritius spill revealed the substance to be “a complex and unusual mix of hydrocarbons.”
Scientists are tracking down deep sea creatures with free-floating DNA
Traditional methods, which include trawling and baited cameras, can only offer snapshots of the complex deep-ocean world, says Elizabeth Allan, a postdoctoral investigator at WHOI who works on the Institute’s ocean twilight zone project.
Pandemic Quiet Is Helping Humans Eavesdrop on Rare Dolphins
According to WHOI’s Laela Sayigh, who was not involved in the Burrunan research, identifying which dolphin in a pod is vocalizing at a particular time is key to deciphering their communication systems.
Why Science Labs Love Older Scientists
Sallie Chisholm, a 72-year-old biologist, has been enthralled by a tiny aquatic microbe that she and a team from WHOI discovered in the Atlantic Ocean in 1985.
As their population plummets, right whales verge on extinction
It’s unknown how many right whales are alive today, but Michael Moore, director of the Marine Mammal Center at WHOI, said there are likely to be fewer than 366.
United States Contributions to Global Ocean Plastic Waste
MPC Research Specialist, Hauke Kite-Powell, has recently been appointed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee to study U.S. contributions to global ocean plastic waste.
How the waters off Catalina became a DDT dumping ground …
A scientist involved in the discovery of the Titanic happened to be on board, so he helped them program the robots on where to go and how to search for the barrels. A marine geochemistry lab at WHOI ran the samples.
The Earth-Shaping Animal Migration No One Ever Sees
“All the vehicles on the road in the United States produce around 1.5 PgC per year,” says Kevin Archibald, a biological oceanographer at WHOI and lead author of that study. DVM could be understood as offsetting about two-thirds of all U.S. automobile emissions.
Should Japan dump radioactive water from Fukushima into the ocean?
Around 1.2 million tonnes of water contaminated by radioactive substances from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster will be dumped in the Pacific Ocean, as part of a plan expected to be approved by the Japanese government within weeks.
Ropeless Fishing Systems Hold Promise for Fishermen—and Whales
To help advance the effort to find a feasible and cost-effective gear-marking solution, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, The Pew Charitable Trusts and others are engaged in conversations with industry, enforcement, and regulators in the U.S. and Canada—which will culminate in a virtual workshop on gear marking in the coming months.
Move Over, Mars: The Search for Life on Saturn’s Largest Moon
“The great thing about hydrothermal vents is that they provide a lot of energy sources for microbial life that doesn’t include sunlight,” says Julie Huber, a marine chemist at WHOI. Organisms living at hydrothermal vents on Earth’s seafloors, she explains, “can use chemical energy, so that means things like sulphur, iron, hydrogen and methane and they create a base of the food chain.”
Looks Like Japan Is Going Ahead With Plan to Dump Radioactive Fukushima Water Into the Ocean
A study from WHOI published in August, warned of the possibility that other potentially hazardous contaminants in the wastewater, namely carbon-14, cobalt-60, and strontium-90, could still be released into the Pacific Ocean.
Heat waves on Cape Cod may be tied to slowing ocean current
WHOI researchers studied 25 years of data in search of cause behind rising ocean temperatures.
Looks Like Japan Is Going Ahead With Plan to Dump Radioactive Fukushima Water Into the Ocean
A WHOI study published in August, warned of the possibility that other potentially hazardous contaminants in the wastewater, namely carbon-14, cobalt-60, and strontium-90, could still be released into the Pacific Ocean.
Woods Hole scientist part of MOSAiC expedition that spent year researching Arctic ecosystem
The research vessel Polarstern returned to its home port in Germany Monday after spending a year locked in thick sea ice, floating in the Arctic Ocean and gathering data. Among those onboard was Carin Ashjian, a senior scientist and biology department chairwoman at WHOI.