Labs, Groups & Service Centers
Service Centers
Northeast National Ion Microprobe Facility (NENIMF)
The Northeast National Ion Microprobe Facility (NENIMF) is an outgrowth of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Regional Ion Microprobe Facililty.
National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (NOSAMS)
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility (NOSAMS) is dedicated to providing high accuracy, high precision 14C data in a timely manner for carbon-bearing samples: seawater, groundwater, organic carbon (OC), carbonates, sediments, individual compounds, and other materials. The three-pronged mission of NOSAMS is to make high quality radiocarbon measurements accessible to the ocean sciences community, to continuously improve and develop new measurement capabilities, and to serve as an educational and outreach resource.
Ocean Bottom Seismograph Instrument Center (OBSIC)
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced that the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) will operate a new center to provide seafloor seismographs and technical support to the U.S. academic community beginning in August 1, 2018. The new Ocean Bottom Seismograph Instrument Center (OBSIC) will be housed at WHOI under a 5-year cooperative agreement, with John Collins serving as Director. The OBSIC replaces the Ocean Bottom Seismograph Instrument Pool, which as created by NSF in 1999 and was jointly operated by WHOI and two other academic institutions.
Groups
Climate and Paleoceanography Group
The thirty-plus members of the Paleoceanography & Climate Group at WHOI use natural archives—sediment cores, corals, glacial ice—and state-of-the-art analytical tools to understand climate-linked changes in the circulation, biology, and chemistry of the oceans.
Coastal Systems Group
The Coastal Group at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution seeks to better understand natural processes and human impact in coastal areas through historic and paleoceanographic study.
Multidisciplinary Instrumentation in Support of Oceanography (MISO)
The intent of establishing the Multidisciplinary Instrumentation in Support of Oceanography (MISO) Facility at WHOI is to provide an adequate pool of commonly used and essential digital imaging equipment and associated sensors and acoustic transponders for various large-scale experiments and programs in the ocean sciences.
Ocean Bottom Seismograph Laboratory
The Ocean Bottom Seismograph (OBS) Lab at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was formed in 1975 to develop seafloor instrumentation that would enable scientists to image the structure of Earth’s crust beneath the seafloor and to record earthquakes from tectonic plate boundaries. Since then, the WHOI OBS Lab has deployed and recovered more than 1,700 ocean bottom seismographs across the globe with instrumentation that has evolved from a handful of simple hydrophone-only instruments in 1975 to a current fleet size of 90 OBS, including 15-month-capable, combined broadband and strong-motion OBS.
WHOI Arctic Group
The Arctic Ocean is an important component of the global climate system. Processes occurring in the Arctic Ocean affect the rate of deep and bottom water formation in the convective regions of the North Atlantic and influence ocean circulation across the globe.
Labs
Bernhard Laboratory
Research Interests: Benthic foraminiferal ecology and paleoecology; Biogeochemistry of redox boundary sediments in both modern and ancient environments; Microaerophilic and anaerobic protists from Oxygen Minimum Zones and methane and cold seeps; Protistan-prokaryote symbioses; Culturing of deep-sea benthic foraminifera to ground truth paleoceanographic proxies; Microbial communities of laminated sediments; Sub-millimeter life positions of microorganisms in sediments; Application of various microscopic techniques (TEM, SEM, LSCM) to marine microbial ecology.
Cohen Lab
Research in the Cohen Lab focuses on climate change and its impact on life in the ocean. Particularly interested in calcification, a process that produces the tiniest seashells, and coral reef ecosystems so big they can be seen from space.
Edgcomb Laboratory
The Edgcomb laboratory studies the diversity and evolution of protists and their distribution and community structure, particularly in marine micro-oxic and anoxic/sulfidic environments.
The Gaetani Lab
Studying experimental petrology and geochemistry.
Guo Lab
Lab research focuses on low-temperature isotope geochemistry, particularly in understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing stable isotope fractionations in nature and applying such knowledge to answering important questions in different fields, including paleoclimate, geobiology, biogeochemistry and cosmochemistry.
Seafloor Samples Laboratory
The Seafloor Samples Laboratory is located in the McLean Laboratory on WHOI’s Quissett Campus. The collection contains more than 14,000 archived marine geological samples that have been carefully recovered from the seabed. The inventory includes long, stratified sediment cores, rock dredges, coral cores, surface grabs and samples collected by submersibles.
The Mantle Rocks (Veronique Le Roux)
Using petrology, geochemistry, field work, experimental petrology, and 3-D imaging of mantle-derived rocks, Veronique Le Roux's lab aims to answer fundamental questions on the nature of the Earth’s mantle.