Student Research
Oceanus Magazine
How Do Corals Build Their Skeletons?
WHOI scientists discovered precisely how ocean acidification affects coral skeletons’ a factor that will help scientists predict how corals throughout the world will fare as the oceans become more acidic.
Searching for ‘Super Reefs’
Some corals are less vulnerable to ocean acidification. Can the offspring from these more resilient corals travel to other reefs to help sustain more vulnerable coral populations there?
How Is the Seafloor Made?
An ultrasound for the Earth? Using sound waves, a graduate student peers into the crystalline texture of the tectonic plates that cover our planet’s surface.
Unearthing Long-Gone Hurricanes
A graduate student at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution tracks a trail of clues left behind on the seafloor by hurricanes as they stream across the ocean.
A Double Whammy for Corals
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 a research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discovered in June 2015 on Dongsha…
Pop Goes the Seafloor Rock
WHOI scientists used the human-occupied submersible Alvin and the autonomous underwater vehicle Sentry to explore a surprising discovery: gas-filled volcanic rocks on the seafloor that “pop” when brought up to the surface.
Not Just Another Lovely Summer Day on the Water
It looks like nice summer day on the water, but Alexis Fischer (right) and Alice Alpert, graduate students in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, are hard at work preparing instruments called sediment traps. They collect detritus and many types of organisms that fall from surface waters to sediments on the bottom of Nauset Marsh, a network…
How Did Earth Get Its Ocean?
Adam Sarafian overcame a learning disability and surmounted heights as a an All-American pole-vaulter—all before launching a scientific career that has now allowed him to hurtle across the universe and…
Coral Crusader
Graduate student Hannah Barkley is on a mission to investigate how warming ocean temperatures, ocean acidification, and other impacts of climate change are affecting corals in an effort to find…
Scientists Find Trigger That Cracks Lakes
Graduate student Laura Stevens became a focal point of a research team that cracked a big mystery atop the Greenland Ice Sheet.