Research Highlights
Oceanus Magazine
Danielle Haas Freeman draws on the language of chemistry to solve an oil spill puzzle
News Releases
A research team led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found that sunlight chemically alters crude oil floating on the sea surface within hours or days. In a follow-up study the team reported that sunlight changes oil into different compounds that dispersants cannot easily break up. The results of these two studies could affect how responders decide when, where, and how to use dispersants.
Scientists have found lingering radioactivity in the lagoons of remote Marshall Island atolls in the Pacific Ocean where the United States conducted 66 nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s and 1950s. Radioactivity levels at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls were extensively…
A study published Aug. 28, 2017, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences adds a new dimension to the controversial decision to inject large amounts of chemical dispersants immediately above the crippled oil well at the seafloor during the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. The dispersants may have significantly reduced the amount of harmful gases in the air at the sea surface’diminishing health risks for emergency responders and allowing them to keep working to stop the uncontrolled spill and clean up the spilled oil sooner.
A new study from WHOI indicates that superoxide’a natural toxin believed to be the main culprit behind coral bleaching’may actually play a beneficial role in coral health and resilience.
A new study may have cracked the longstanding ‘marine methane paradox,’ finding that the answer may lie in the complex ways that bacteria break down substances excreted into seawater by living organisms.