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WHOI’s 11th President and Director Peter de Menocal. (Photo by Daniel Hentz, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
Dr. Peter de Menocal, President and Director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as a AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers.
This year 489 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.
This year’s AAAS Fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News & Notes section of the journal Science on 27 November 2020. A virtual Fellows Forum—an induction ceremony for the new Fellows—will be held on 13 February 2021.
As part of the Geology and Geography section, Dr. Peter de Menocal was elected as an AAAS Fellow for his fundamental contributions to understanding human physical and cultural evolution in relation to paleo-environmental change on the African continent.
“I’m honored to be included in this distinguished group,” said de Menocal. “The mission of AAAS aligns well with WHOI’s in our quest to share scientific knowledge and inform people and policies for a healthier planet.”
The tradition of AAAS Fellows began in 1874. Currently, members can be considered for the rank of Fellow if nominated by the steering groups of the association’s 24 sections, or by any three Fellows who are current AAAS members (so long as two of the three sponsors are not affiliated with the nominee’s institution), or by the AAAS chief executive officer. Fellows must have been continuous members of AAAS for four years by the end of the calendar year in which they are elected. The AAAS Fellow honor comes with an expectation that recipients maintain the highest standards of professional ethics and scientific integrity.
Each steering group reviews the nominations of individuals within its respective section and a final list is forwarded to the AAAS Council, which votes on the aggregate list.
The Council is the policymaking body of the Association, chaired by the AAAS president, and consisting of the members of the board of directors, the retiring section chairs, delegates from each electorate and each regional division, and two delegates from the National Association of Academies of Science.
AAAS encourages its sections and Council to consider diversity among those nominated and selected as Fellows, in keeping with the association’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
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About Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its mission is to understand the ocean and its interactions with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in fundamental and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation, and operate the most extensive suite of ocean data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge to inform people and policies for a healthier planet. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu
About Dr. Peter de Menocal
Dr. Peter de Menocal is a marine geologist and paleo-oceanographer who studies deep-sea sediments as archives of past climate change, illuminating centuries of climate history and ocean circulation patterns in the geological record and drawing connections to the human dimensions of climate change today.
De Menocal was the Thomas Alva Edison/Con Edison Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. De Menocal also served as Columbia’s Dean of Science for the Faculty of Arts & Sciences between 2016-2019, overseeing the University’s nine scientific departments. During his tenure as Dean of Science, he developed and executed on a strategic plan that helped double philanthropic support for the sciences, significantly increase success in winning large center and institute awards, and double faculty hiring rates for women and under-represented minorities in the natural sciences.
De Menocal has published more than 150 scientific papers over his decades-long career in oceanography. He is also the founding director of Columbia’s Center for Climate and Life, a team of more than 120 PhD scientists and other experts mobilizing use-inspired science to understand how climate impacts essential aspects of human life, including food security, water, shelter, and sustainable energy solutions. Under de Menocal’s leadership, the Center pioneered collaborations with the private sector to inform science-based solutions.
About the American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information about AAAS, see www.aaas.org.
Intense tropical cyclones are expected to become more frequent as climate change increases temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. But not every area will experience storms of the same magnitude. New research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) published in Nature Geosciences reveals that tropical cyclones were actually more frequent in the southern Marshall Islands during the Little Ice Age, when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were cooler than they are today.
This means that changes in atmospheric circulation, driven by differential ocean warming, heavily influence the location and intensity of tropical cyclones.
In the first study of its kind so close to the equator, lead author James Bramante reconstructed 3,000 years of storm history on Jaluit Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands. This region is the birthplace of tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific—the world’s most active tropical cyclone zone. Using differences in sediment size as evidence of extreme weather events, Bramante found that tropical cyclones occurred in the region roughly once a century, but increased to a maximum of four per century from 1350 to 1700 CE, a period known as the Little Ice Age.
Bramante, a recent graduate of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering, says this finding sheds light on how climate change affects where cyclones are able to form.
Key Takeaways
- Researchers reconstructed the history of tropical cyclones in the southern Marshall Islands over the last 3,000 years. The western North Pacific is the world’s most active zone for tropical cyclones, but has been understudied compared to the North Atlantic.
- During the Little Ice Age, tropical cyclones formed in the western North Pacific deep tropics more frequently than any other time in the record. Data from the sediment samples recorded four tropical cyclones per century, which is well above the 3,000-year average of one per century.
- Climate change is projected to create conditions opposite of the Little Ice Age, indicating that tropical cyclones will form less often in the southern Marshall Islands, even as storms are expected to be more frequent and intense at higher latitudes.
WHOI researchers reconstructed 3,000 years of storm history on Jaluit Atoll in the southern Marshall Islands. This region is the birthplace of tropical cyclones in the western North Pacific—the world’s most active tropical cyclone zone. (Map by Natalie Renier, ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)
“Atmospheric circulation changes due to modern, human-induced climate warming are opposite of the circulation changes due to the Little Ice Age,” notes Bramante. “So we can expect to see the opposite effect in the deep tropics—a decrease in tropical cyclones close to the equator. It could be good news for the southern Marshall Islands, but other areas would be threatened as the average location of cyclone generation shifts north,” he adds.
During major storm events, coarse sediment is stirred up and deposited by currents and waves into “blue holes”, ancient caves that collapsed and turned into sinkholes that filled with sea water over thousands of years. In a 2015 field study, Bramante and his colleagues took samples from a blue hole on Jaluit Atoll and found coarse sediment among the finer grains of sand. After sorting the grains by size and analyzing the data from Typhoon Ophelia, which devastated the atoll in 1958, the researchers had a template with which to identify other storm events that appear in the sediment record. They then used radiocarbon dating—a method of determining age by the ratio of carbon isotopes in a sample—to date the sediment in each layer.
Armed with previously-collected data about the ancient climate from tree rings, coral cores, and fossilized marine organisms, the researchers were able to piece together the conditions that existed at the time. By connecting this information with the record of storms preserved in sediment from Jaluit Atoll, the researchers demonstrated through computer modeling that the particular set of conditions responsible for equatorial trade winds heavily influenced the number, intensity and location where cyclones would form.
Jeff Donnelly, a WHOI senior scientist and a co-author of the study, used similar methods to reconstruct the history of hurricanes in the North Atlantic and Caribbean. He plans to expand the Marshall Islands study westward to the Philippines to study where tropical cyclones have historically formed and how climate conditions influence a storm’s track and intensity. Better understanding of how storms behaved under previous conditions will help scientists understand what causes changes in tropical cyclone activity and aid people living in coastal communities prepare for extreme weather in the future, he said.
“Through the geologic archive, we can get a baseline that tells us how at-risk we really are at any one location,” Donnelly says. “It turns out the past provides some useful analogies for the climate change that we’re currently undergoing. The earth has already run this experiment. Now we’re trying to go back and determine the drivers of tropical cyclones.”
Additional co-authors of this study include WHOI geologist Andrew Ashton; WHOI physical oceanographer Caroline Ummenhofer; Murray Ford (University of Auckland, New Zealand); Paul Kench (Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada); Michael Toomey (US Geological Survey, Reston, Virginia); Richard Sullivan of Texas A&M University; and Kristopher Karnauskas (University of Colorado, Boulder).
This research was funded by the Strategic Environmental Research & Development Program, a partnership between the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation, and operate the most extensive suite of data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu
Research simulates dramatic climate impacts for future Antarctic ice sheet melt
In a new climate modeling study that looked at the impacts of accelerated ice melt from the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) on future climate, a team of climate scientists led by Alan Condron at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), reports that future ice-sheet melt is expected to have significant effects on global climate.
The research team, which also included Shaina Sadai and Rob DeConto at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and David Pollard at Pennsylvania State University, presented their findings this week in Science Advances. The study predicts how future climate conditions could change under high and low greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, while accounting for accelerated melting of the AIS.
Scientists have long recognized that future meltwater input from the Antarctic will affect the Southern Ocean and global climate, but ice-sheet processes are not currently included in even the most state-of-the-art climate prediction simulations. The research team reports that their new models with the added ice melt information reveal important interacting processes and demonstrate a need to accurately account for meltwater input from ice sheets in order to make confident climate predictions.
“In the ice sheet models run by my co-authors Rob DeConto and David Pollard, large parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) rapidly collapse about 100 years from now,” says Condron. “Simply put, previous climate models have not addressed how all that fresh water coming out of the AIS might impact future climate.”
“We found that future meltwater coming off Antarctica leads to huge amounts of thick sea ice around the continent,” adds Sadai, lead author of the study and PhD graduate student of Condron. “With higher greenhouse gas emissions, the ice sheet melts faster, which in turn leads to more freshwater flowing into the ocean and more sea ice production.”
All this additional sea ice dramatically slows the pace of future warming around Antarctica, the researchers report, which is seemingly welcome news. The climate impacts are not just restricted to the Antarctic, Condron points out that the cooling effects of this melt water are felt worldwide.
“It’s important to note that this is not a global ‘cooling’ scenario as average global temperatures would still be roughly three degrees Celsius warmer than today due to human greenhouse gas emissions, even with the cooling effects of this melt water on climate,” says Condron.
But that is not the end of the story. “Even though the atmospheric warming slows, in the deeper part of the ocean where the base of the WAIS is touching the ocean floor, we see water temperatures warming up to one degree Celsius. This subsurface warming could make the ice sheet much more unstable and accelerate rates of sea level rise beyond current projections,” Condron says.
While the delayed future warming found in the new simulations may sound like good news, the researchers say it is important to keep in mind that serious warming and sea level rise will still occur with unabated greenhouse gas emissions, which will impact coastal communities and ecosystems worldwide.
This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Polar Programs through NSF grant 1443347, the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) division of the U.S. Department of Energy through grant DE-SC0019263.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate an understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. WHOI’s pioneering discoveries stem from an ideal combination of science and engineering—one that has made it one of the most trusted and technically advanced leaders in basic and applied ocean research and exploration anywhere. WHOI is known for its multidisciplinary approach, superior ship operations, and unparalleled deep-sea robotics capabilities. We play a leading role in ocean observation, and operate the most extensive suite of data-gathering platforms in the world. Top scientists, engineers, and students collaborate on more than 800 concurrent projects worldwide—both above and below the waves—pushing the boundaries of knowledge and possibility. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu
Key Takeaways
- Even the most state-of-the art climate models currently do not account for changes in the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) caused by climate change. In particular, they do not consider the vulnerability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) to rapid retreat and collapse.
- Using a sophisticated new ice sheet and climate model, the study found that a future collapse of the WAIS could dramatically cool the Southern Hemisphere by up to 10 degrees Celsius. Significantly, this cooling reduces the projected rise in global temperature by up to two degrees Celsius.
- The global temperature reduction should not be regarded as a ‘global cooling’ scenario though. Average global temperatures would still be around three degrees Celsius warmer than today about a century from now, but this is cooler than the roughly five degrees Celsius warming currently projected under high greenhouse gas emission scenarios.
- The opposite temperature response is found in the ocean at the base of the ice sheet where the ice is ‘glued’ to the bedrock. Here, water temperatures could warm by one to two degrees Celsius, which could reduce the future stability of the AIS and accelerate rates of ice loss and projected rates of sea-level rise beyond current projections.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists appear in two shorts and a feature film at this year’s Woods Hole Film Festival (WHFF). In addition, scientists will also participate in Q&A sessions connected to three of the festival’s feature-length, ocean-themed entries.
The short films, “Divergent Warmth” and “Beyond the Gulf Stream” are part of a program titled “The Blue Between Us,” offered on-demand from July 25 to August 1 as part of the festival’s virtual program.
In “Divergent Warmth,” producer-director Megan Lubetkin gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the synchronized ballet aboard a research vessel during a recent expedition to the East Pacific Rise. Experimental music provides rhythm to imagery of deck operations, launch and recovery of the human-occupied submersible Alvin, and other-worldly views of seafloor hydrothermal vents and lava flows. Interwoven throughout is an evocative reading of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “Diving into the Wreck.”
Dan Fornari, a WHOI emeritus research scholar, acted as associate producer of the 10-minute film. As one of the scientists on the December 2019 expedition, he invited Lubetkin, herself a scientist and the creative exhibits coordinator with the Ocean Exploration Trust, to assist with subsea camera operations and video data management on board. Lubetkin spent her free time shooting additional video, which she edited together while still on the ship to produce a first draft of “Divergent Warmth.”
“I was blown away. It was just fabulous,” Fornari said of his first viewing. “It captures the spirit of going out to sea and being involved in this exploratory effort in the alien realm, where very few people get to go.”
The complex winter currents that collide off the coast of Cape Hatteras are the focus of “Beyond the Gulf Stream,” a short documentary by the Georgia-based production company MADLAWMEDIA. Filmed aboard the WHOI-operated research vessel Neil Armstrong, the 10-minute film features WHOI physical oceanographers Magdalena Andres, Glen Gawarkiewicz, and graduate student Jacob Forsyth as they share their perspectives on the challenges and rewards of doing scientific research at sea, often in difficult conditions.
“I think we have a responsibility to communicate science and the process of doing of science to the public,” said Andres about the film, which was produced in collaboration with WHOI and the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography at the University of Georgia. “It does a really nice job of capturing life at sea in the wintertime.”
As a scientist who uses video to capture data from the ocean depths, Fornari is highly attuned to the impact that visual media can have in capturing the public’s imagination about the ocean.
“These kinds of artistic expressions help open doors to people’s minds.” he said. “That’s crucial for getting the public to understand how critically important the oceans are. Then maybe more students will say, ‘I want to be an ocean scientist when I grow up.’”
In addition to the shorts program itself, WHOI scientists, staff, and students will also participate in “Filmmaker Chats” open to the public and broadcast via Zoom, as well as the WHFF Facebook and YouTube channels. Maddux-Lawrence will take questions about “Beyond the Gulf Stream” on Sunday, July 19, beginning at 9:00 a.m. On Friday, July 31 at 9:00 a.m., Lubetkin will appear with Fornari, as well as Alvin pilot Drew Bewley, MIT-WHOI Joint Program graduate student Lauren Dykman, and Texas A&M graduate student Charlie Holmes II to discuss the making of and science behind “Divergent Warmth.” Recordings of both sessions will also be available for viewing afterward on the festival website.
In addition to the short films, WHOI whale biologist Michael Moore appears in the feature-length documentary “Entangled,” which looks at the intertwined plights of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale and coastal fishing communities in New England and eastern Canada. After being hunted for centuries, the whales face new challenges in the form of climate change and increased fishing and shipping activity, and Moore has been an outspoken proponent of the need for increased protections to stave off their slide to extinction within the next 20 years.
WHOI scientists will also add their perspective to Q&A sessions following several ocean-themed, feature-length films selected for the festival:
- Thursday, July 30, at 10:00 p.m.: Research specialist Hauke Kite-Powell will answer questions related to aquaculture and seafood in relation to the film “Fish & Men.
- Saturday, August 1, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.: Marine chemist Chris Reddy will answer questions about microplastics in relation to the film “Microplastics Madness.”
- Saturday, August 1, from 7:00 to 8:00 p.m.: Marine biologist Simon Thorrold will answer questions about marine protected areas and fishing in connection with the film “Current Sea.”
Key Takeaways
- Films featuring WHOI scientists will be screened as part of “The Blue Between Us” shorts program at the virtual Woods Hole Film Festival, which may be viewed online by festival passholders and individual ticketholders during the festival, which runs from Saturday, July 25, to Saturday, August 1. Tickets and more information is available here.
- Whale biologist Michael Moore will appear in the feature-length film “Entangled” about the plight of critically endangered North Atlantic right whales.
- WHOI scientists will also participate in Q&A sessions associated with several ocean-themed, feature-length festival films.
- More information is available on the festival website.
Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) reveal how microorganisms could survive in rocks nestled thousands of feet beneath the ocean floor in the lower oceanic crust, in a study published on March 11 in Nature. The first analysis of messenger RNA—genetic material containing instructions for making different proteins—from this remote region of Earth, coupled with measurements of enzyme activities, microscopy, cultures, and biomarker analyses provides evidence of a low biomass, but diverse community of microbes that includes heterotrophs that obtain their carbon from other living (or dead) organisms.
“Organisms eking out an existence far beneath the seafloor live in a hostile environment,” says Dr. Paraskevi (Vivian) Mara, a WHOI biochemist and one of the lead authors of the paper. Scarce resources find their way into the seabed through seawater and subsurface fluids that circulate through fractures in the rock and carry inorganic and organic compounds.
To see what kinds of microbes live at these extremes and what they do to survive, researchers collected rock samples from the lower oceanic crust over three months aboard the International Ocean Discovery Program Expedition 360. The research vessel traveled to an underwater ridge called Atlantis Bank that cuts across the Southern Indian Ocean. There, tectonic activity exposes the lower oceanic crust at the seafloor, “providing convenient access to an otherwise largely inaccessible realm,” write the authors.
Researchers combed the rocks for genetic material and other organic molecules, performed cell counts, and cultured samples in the lab to aid in their search for life. “We applied a completely new cocktail of methods to really try to explore these precious samples as intensively as we could,” says Dr. Virginia Edgcomb, a microbiologist at WHOI, the lead PI of the project, and a co-author of the paper. “All together, the data start to paint a story.”
Key Takeaways
- Scientists collected rock samples from the lower oceanic crust down to 2,400 feet beneath the ocean floor in search of life.
- In the first analysis of genetic material from this region to uncover how organisms might survive, researchers provide evidence that microbes efficiently recycle and store available organic compounds.
- Genetic material suggests that many lower crust microbes cannot produce their own food and rely on carbon found in the environment to obtain energy.
- These findings provide a more complete picture of carbon cycling by illuminating biologic activity deep below the planet’s surface.

By isolating messenger RNA and analyzing the expression of genes—the instructions for different metabolic processes—researchers showed evidence that microorganisms far beneath the ocean express genes for a diverse array of survival strategies. Some microbes appeared to have the ability to store carbon in their cells, so they could stockpile for times of shortage. Others had indications they could process nitrogen and sulfur to generate energy, produce Vitamin E and B12, recycle amino acids, and pluck out carbon from hard-to-breakdown compounds called polyaromatic hydrocarbons. “They seem very frugal,” says Edgcomb.
This rare view of life in the far reaches of the earth extends our view of carbon cycling beneath the seafloor, Edgcomb says. “If you look at the volume of the deep biosphere, including the lower oceanic crust, even at a very slow metabolic rate, it could equate to significant amounts of carbon.”
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.The research team also included colleagues from Tongji University, University of Bremen, Texas A&M University, Université de Brest, and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.
A new study by scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues shows for the first time how massive flood events in the eastern North Pacific Ocean—known as the Missoula Floods—may have in part triggered abrupt climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere during the last deglaciation (approximately 19,000–11,700 years ago). The findings, published Feb. 26, 2020, in the journal Science Advances, are contrary to the long held notion that cooling was primarily driven by changes in North Atlantic circulation.
“Everyone’s been searching for evidence of floods into the North Atlantic that might have caused various cooling events, but very little has been done to investigate whether the Missoula Floods had any impact beyond the Pacific Northwest,” says lead author Summer Praetorius, a Research Geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and former WHOI research assistant.
Sedimentary deposits on land indicate that the Missoula Floods occurred nearly 100 times during the first part of deglaciation as former Glacial Lake Missoula in Montana repeatedly filled and drained enormous volumes of fresh water down the modern-day Columbia River, into the northeastern Pacific Ocean.
“The peak discharge of water during these flood events would have been equivalent to the flow of 85 Amazon Rivers,” says Alan Condron, a climate scientist at WHOI and coauthor of the paper. “In fact, these floods were the largest on Earth, dwarfing outburst floods from the Laurentide ice sheet that have frequently been proposed as major triggers of abrupt deglacial climate change, but little is known about what happened once the waters entered the Pacific Ocean.”
Key Takeaways
- Scientists used a high-resolution model for the first time to trace the trajectory of Missoula Flood waters exiting the Columbia River during the last deglaciation.
- Abrupt climate changes in the Northern Hemisphere may have been triggered in part by Missoula Flood events and changes in Pacific Ocean circulation, contrary to the notion that they were primarily driven by changes in North Atlantic circulation.
- These results improve our understanding of the fate of the Missoula Flood waters once entering the Pacific Ocean and suggest an important role for North Pacific circulation changes in affecting Northern Hemisphere climate, which has previously been overlooked.

In this study, Praetorius and Condron, along with collaborators Alan Mix, Maureen Walczak, Jennifer McKay and Jianghui Du from Oregon State University, show for the first time the trajectory of Missoula Flood waters exiting the Columbia River.
Using Condron’s high-resolution climate model, they found that meltwater flowed across the North Pacific following coastal boundary currents and ultimately made it as far west as Japan, where it was incorporated into the Kuroshio Current—the Pacific equivalent of the Gulf Stream current.
While the largest of the Missoula Floods occurred when sea levels were much lower than today due to water being locked up in large ice sheets, the final Missoula floods occur close to the time when the Bering Strait land bridge between Russia and Alaska was finally submerged by rising sea level and Pacific waters entered the Arctic. To account for this, Condron also ran his climate model with the Bering Strait open, much like modern day to trace the water’s route in both scenarios.
“We were excited and surprised to find that when the Bering strait land bridge was submerged, floodwaters from Glacial lake Missoula flowed through the Arctic Ocean to the North Atlantic where processes controlling the strength of the Gulf Stream and transport of heat to Europe and North America take place,” says Condron. “Basically this is the region of the ocean that seems capable of triggering large-scale climate change.”
The above model shows meltwater released from the Columbia River (bright blue) flowing north towards Alaska in narrow coastal boundary currents. The meltwater, which is less salty or “fresher” than the surrounding water, continues west, reaching Japan after just one year before recirculating eastwards towards the west coast of North America. In just three years, the entire subpolar North Pacific ocean has become “fresher” as a result of the floods, although the exact amount would have been dependent on the size of each flood event, which varied through time.
The precise timing of when the Bering Strait opened is still a matter of some debate and on-going research, Condron notes, but is does demonstrate a possible connection between Pacific meltwater and the North Atlantic that was not known before.
In order to assess the evidence for how Missoula flood events may have impacted ocean circulation and climate, the researchers compiled an extensive collection of data from fossil plankton in marine sediment cores throughout the Northeast Pacific to reconstruct changes in sea surface temperature, sea surface salinity, and deep-water circulation.
The compilation shows that there were two major periods of ocean freshening (a decrease in salinity) and cooling during the last deglaciation. The first was early in the deglaciation, at about the same time the largest of the Missoula floods occurred. Curiously, this was a time of cooling in the Northern Hemisphere that has previously been attributed to a massive release of icebergs to the North Atlantic. Recent evidence suggesting that the icebergs drifted into the North Atlantic after the cooling had already started though has meant the cause of the cooling is still a mystery. Praetorius, Condron and colleagues now point to the Missoula Floods as a possible cause of this early cooling event.
Similarly, the team found a second interval of ocean cooling and freshening during the Younger Dryas period—an abrupt cooling period in the Northern Hemisphere that has a long history of contentious debate on its causes. Some scientists say it was floods into the Atlantic that caused the cooling, some say it was a comet impact, and now Praetorius and collaborators are adding a new twist.
Condron notes that the results are quite humbling as the geologist, J Harlen Bretz, who first recognized in the 1920’s that these floods shaped the landscape of the Pacific northwest, was initially derided by the geological community as his findings were considered ‘preposterous’ and ‘incompetent.’
“Yet, close to 100 years on, our results suggest that meltwater into the Pacific may have also played a role in the climate shift,” he adds.
These findings highlight the importance of changes in North Pacific circulation as an integral player in deglacial climate events.
Funding for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation. Numerical model simulations were run in-house at WHOI on the new HPC resource, Poseidon.
Collaborators on this study are from U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the ocean and its interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the ocean’s role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.
Researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and colleagues found that delta areas worldwide have actually gained land in the past 30 years, despite river damming. However, recent land gains are unlikely to last throughout the 21st century due to expected, accelerated sea level rise. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature.
River deltas rank among the most economically and ecologically valuable environments on Earth. People living on deltas are increasingly vulnerable to sea-level rise and coastal hazards such as major storms, extremely high tides, and tsunamis. Many deltas experience a decline in sediment supply due to upstream damming, making them even more vulnerable. However, the new study found that long-term, large-scale, upstream deforestation has resulted in soil erosion that increased the amount of sediment transported to many deltas.
“A large driver for these gains turned out to be human action,” says lead author Jaap Nienhuis, a geoscientist at Utrecht University and a graduate of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. “Twenty five percent of delta growth can be attributed to upstream deforestation, which results in soil erosion and increased sediment delivery to the coast. Human action such as damming causes sediment starvation and increased importance of wave- and tide-driven transport, which can also change delta shape.”
The relationship between the sediment deposited by rivers, oceanographic forces of waves and tides, and delta shape has remained poorly understood. To address this, the international team of researchers developed and applied a novel theory that can quantify how waves and tides influence delta shape. The availability of global satellite imagery allowed them to test their new model on over 10,000 deltas worldwide, ranging from small to mega-deltas.
“Applying this novel prediction of delta shape to global examples allowed us to quantify how delta shape affects change,” says WHOI geologist Andrew Ashton, a coauthor of the paper. “For example, when sediment supply diminishes, deltas dominated by waves tend to erode, while tide-dominated deltas continue to grow.”
The next step in the research is to extend the model to make predictions of future delta change, particularly for rising sea levels. Understanding how waves and tides modify river deltas will be critical for anticipating future change, both locally and globally.
The research team also included colleagues from Florida State University, Wageningen University and Research, Tulane University, Indiana University, University of Colorado Boulder Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Netherlands Science Organization NWO.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.
Key Takeaways
- Delta areas worldwide have gained land in the past 30 years, despite river damming.
- Large-scale, upstream deforestation has resulted in soil erosion that increased the amount of sediment transported to many deltas.
- These land gains are unlikely to last throughout the 21st century due to expected, accelerated sea level rise.
- Understanding how waves and tides control river delta shape is critical for anticipating future change, both locally and globally.
- The next step is to extend the new model to predict how sea-level rise will affect future delta change.
The essential roles that microbes play in deep-sea ecosystems are at risk from the potential environmental impacts of mining, found a new paper by researchers at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and colleagues. The study reviews what is known about microbes in these environments and assesses how mining could impact their important environmental roles. The findings are published in the journal of Limnology and Oceanography.
“The push for deep-sea mining has really accelerated in the last few years, and it is crucial that policy makers and the industry understand these microbes and the services they provide,” said Beth Orcutt, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and the lead author of the study. “This paper establishes what we know and suggests next steps for using the best science to evaluate the impacts of this new human activity in the deep sea.”
Microbes across the seafloor are responsible for essential ecosystem services, from fueling the food web to powering global nutrient cycles. Environments that are promising for mining are also often the sites of globally-important microbial processes and unusual animal communities – and may be slow to recover from disturbances.
Orcutt and her coauthors analyzed four types of deep-sea mineral resources, including the metal-rich rocks that stud underwater mountains and lie on the seafloor. Their findings indicate the likely impacts of mining on microbial communities vary substantially, from minimal disturbance to the irreversible loss of important habitat services.
Hydrothermal vent systems, for example, are particularly sensitive – and valuable. The hot, mineral-rich waters support robust communities of microbes that form the vital base of the food web in these ecosystems. The extreme environmental conditions also foster rich genetic diversity among the microbes, making them promising candidates in the search for anti-cancer drugs and other new biotechnology applications.
“These microbes have incredible potential to inspire new solutions to all sorts of medical and technical challenges we face today,” said Julie Huber, a WHOI scientist and co-author of the new study. “But if we damage or destroy a habitat like a hydrothermal vent, we lose the diverse the pool of microbial genetic information from which we can find new enzymes or drugs.”
Consumer demand for products like smartphones and electric cars is driving the rapidly growing interest in deep-sea mining for metals like cobalt and rare earth elements, which are used in lithium-ion batteries. The International Seabed Authority of the United Nations is working to establish guidelines for countries and contractors to explore the seafloor for minerals, and to eventually mine them.
While guidelines for licensed exploration already suggest that site assessments should include how much microbial life is present, the researchers on the new study emphasize that it is equally important to determine what roles the microbes are playing and assess how they would be impacted by mining.
“It is important to understand the potential impacts of mining activities to figure out if they should occur and how to manage them if they do,” said James Bradley, a scientist at Queen Mary University of London and co-author on the paper. “This is an important conversation between policy makers, industry, and the scientific community, and it’s important that we work together to get this right. Once these ecosystems are damaged, they may never fully recover.”
This study was supported by the NSF-funded Center for Dark Energy Biosphere Investigations (C-DEBI) and the Sloan Foundation-funded Deep Carbon Observatory.
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.
Key Takeaways
- Seafloor microbes are responsible for essential processes from fueling the food web to powering global nutrient cycles.
- Environments that are promising for deep-sea mining are also often the sites of globally-important microbial processes and unusual animal communities, which may be slow to recover from disturbances.
- The likely impacts of mining on microbial communities vary substantially, from minimal disturbance to the irreversible loss of important habitat.
- If hydrothermal vent habitats are damaged or destroyed, we could lose the diverse pool of microbial genetic information from which we may find new enzymes or drugs.
New research from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) published Aug. 19, 2019, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science provides evidence of the formation and abundance of abiotic methane—methane formed by chemical reactions that don’t involve organic matter—on Earth and shows how the gases could have a similar origin on other planets and moons, even those no longer home to liquid water. Researchers had long noticed methane released from deep-sea vents. But while the gas is plentiful in the atmosphere where it’s produced by living things, the source of methane at the seafloor was a mystery.
“Identifying an abiotic source of deep-sea methane has been a problem that we’ve been wrestling with for many years,” says Jeffrey Seewald a senior scientist at WHOI who studies geochemistry in hydrothermal systems and is one of the study’s authors.
Of 160 rock samples analyzed from across the world’s oceans, almost all contained pockets of methane. These oceanic deposits make up a reservoir exceeding the amount of methane in Earth’s atmosphere before industrialization, estimates Frieder Klein, a marine geologist at WHOI and lead author of the study.
“We were totally surprised to find this massive pool of abiotic methane in the oceanic crust and mantle,” Klein says.
The scientists analyzed rocks using Raman spectroscopy, a laser-based microscope that allows them to identify fluids and minerals in a thin slice of rock. Nearly every sample contained an assemblage of minerals and gases that form when seawater, moving through the deep oceanic crust, is trapped in magma-hot olivine. As the mineral cools, the water trapped inside undergoes a chemical reaction, a process called serpentinization that forms hydrogen and methane. The authors demonstrate that in otherwise inhospitable environments, just two ingredients—water and olivine—can form methane.
“Here’s a source of chemical energy that’s being created by geology,” says Seewald.
On Earth, deep-sea methane might have played a critical role for the evolution of primitive organisms living at hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, Seewald explains. And elsewhere in the solar system, on places like Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus, methane produced through the same process could provide an energy source for basic life forms.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.

Agency funds five-year effort to understand the potential for life in outer solar system and establishes a new Network for Ocean Worlds
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) will invest in a major new research program headquartered at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) that pulls together some of the nation’s leading experts in ocean and space research, as well as a new research network to facilitate ocean worlds research at academic and research institutions nationwide.
Speaking at the 2019 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) in Seattle where the project was announced, lead investigator and WHOI senior scientist Christopher German described the focus of the Exploring Ocean Worlds (ExOW) project as one that would address a central question in astrobiology research today: “On which ocean worlds, and using which measurements, do we have the highest probability of finding life beyond Earth within the next human generation?”

The project will form a cornerstone for NASA’s new Network for Ocean Worlds (NOW), which was also announced today. NOW is an initiative aimed at accelerating research on planetary bodies with liquid water oceans that may harbor life or conditions that could support it by coordinating scientific studies nationwide that help advance understanding of ocean worlds. The network will be co-led by German, at WHOI, together with Alison Murray at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) and Alyssa Rhoden at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI).
“If we hope to find evidence of life beyond Earth, within the next human generation, then our best bet is to look toward the growing list of ice-covered ocean worlds right here in our own solar system,” said German. “And looking further ahead, if we want to understand the range of possible conditions that could support life anywhere beyond Earth, then we will simultaneously need to both continue exploring our own ocean for examples of extremes under which life can exist and continue developing exploration technologies that will be useful on any ocean world, including Earth.”



Ocean worlds beyond Earth have been a key research focus for NASA’s Planetary Science Division ever since the confirmation of ice-covered liquid water oceans on Jupiter’s moons Europa and Ganymede and, subsequently, Saturn’s moons Enceladus and Titan. NOW is the latest of four research coordination networks (RCNs) to be established by NASA, introduced today at AbSciCon, that will enable research covering different aspects of the search for life beyond Earth.
“Given NASA’s objective to understand the distribution of life beyond Earth, astrobiology will be the focus of a growing number of NASA’s science missions,” said Mary Voytek, NASA Senior Scientist for Astrobiology in a November 2018 NASA Astrobiology release announcing the establishment of the networks. “These new RCNs will contribute to fulfilling the program’s goals including enabling future missions to find habitable worlds and life.”
The NOW network will include ExOW, a $7.6 million, five-year project led by German, from WHOI, with partners from 9 other institutions across the U.S. Other oceanographic laboratories involved in ExOW include the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of Minnesota, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, MIT, and Harvard University. From the space community, the team includes planetary scientists at Arizona State University, and NASA’s Ames Research Center and Jet Propulsion Laboratory.Ultimately, the ExOW team intends to construct a comprehensive theoretical model, informed and tested by experimental efforts, that connects a broad range of physical and chemical processes within an ocean system. The model will help determine the potential of that system to harbor life and to reveal evidence of that life to future NASA missions.
“Our approach is designed to provide a predictive framework applicable to all ocean worlds of this type, but will have clear, immediate and direct relevance to two high priority astrobiology targets: Europa and Enceladus,” said German. The project is designed to be completed just in time for the launch of Europa Clipper, NASA’s next major mission to an ocean world, which is currently scheduled for launch in the early 2020s.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, non-profit organization on Cape Cod, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans’ role in the changing global environment. For more information, please visit www.whoi.edu.

