Research Highlights
Oceanus Magazine
Corals are under a lot stress these days—from pollution, overfishing, sea level rise, warmer seawater temperatures, and the increasing acidity of the oceans. Among these stressors, the impact of ocean acidification is often the most insidious and difficult to detect....
A newborn coral—shaped like a very tiny grain of rice—drifts through the open ocean. It gets one chance to choose a home where it might survive. After settling down, it never moves again. If it finds the right place, the...
“Wait a minute. What is that?” It was February 1977, and Robert Ballard, a marine geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), sat aboard the research vessel Knorr 400 miles off the South American coast, staring at photos before him....
Board a ship in Los Angeles and head southwest until you lose sight of land. Then keep going, and going, and going, until you reach the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean. There’s nothing to see there but water...
On Aug. 30, 2017, as the morning sun rose over the dusty savanna of West Africa, few were aware that the rustling breeze announced the birth of a terrifying but still unknown event. Who amongst us would recognize the gentle...
Scientists know that gradually rising ocean temperatures can push corals past a threshold and cause them to bleach. But combine this chronic stress with an acute short-term weather shift, and the amplified impacts can be sudden and devastating. That’s what...
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution wasn’t an obvious fit for Emily Sarafian. “I always felt a little out of place here, because I don’t study the ocean, really,” said Sarafian, a recent graduate student of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. At WHOI,...
The living, breathing ocean may be slowly starting to suffocate. The ocean has lost more than two percent of its oxygen over the past-half century, and oxygen-depleted “dead zones” continue to expand throughout the global ocean. This deoxygenation poses a...
The spark that ignited the fiery volcanic heart of Yellowstone National Park began more than 30 million years ago. Two of Earth’s colossal continental plates, centered over what is now the American West, began drifting apart. They stretched Earth’s crust...
News Releases
A new study has revealed for the first time the last 500-year flood history of the Mississippi River. It shows a dramatic rise in the size and frequency of extreme floods in the past century—mostly due to projects to straighten,...
The rising acidity of the oceans threatens coral reefs by making it harder for corals to build their skeletons. A new study identifies the details of how ocean acidification affects coral skeletons, allowing scientists to predict more precisely where corals...
On July 18, 2012, passengers on an airline flight over the Southwest Pacific Ocean glimpsed something unusual—a raft of floating rock known as pumice that indicated an underwater volcanic eruption had occurred on the seafloor northeast of New Zealand. The...
Beneath the ocean, massive tectonic plates converge and grind against one another, which drives one below the other. This powerful collision, called subduction, is responsible for forming volcanic arcs that are home to some of Earth’s most dramatic geological events,...
In the South China Sea, a 2°C rise in the sea surface temperature in June 2015 was amplified to produce a 6°C rise on Dongsha Atoll, a shallow coral reef ecosystem, killing approximately 40 percent of the resident coral community...
The temperature of Earth’s interior affects everything from the movement of tectonic plates to the formation of the planet. A new study led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) suggests the mantle—the mostly solid, rocky part of Earth’s interior that...
Henry Dick of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon association members by their peers. A...
Since their first discovery a generation ago, it has been recognized that hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the deep dark oceans represented unique habitats for exotic forms of life previously unknown to science. But what has gone quite overlooked,...
In 2009, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution embarked on a NASA-funded mission to the Mid-Cayman Rise in the Caribbean, in search of a type of deep-sea hot-spring or hydrothermal vent that they believed held clues to the search for...
As the ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels, its chemistry is changing. The carbon dioxide, which is the primary greenhouse gas responsible for global warming, reacts with water molecules, lowering ocean pH in a...