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A Matter of Degrees

Two celebrated research institutions joined forces in 1967 to launch the MIT-WHOI Joint Program in Oceanography. Last month, the program awarded its one-thousandth graduate degree. Jim Yoder, vice president for academic programs and dean, conferred the program’s first four-digit degree on Rebecca Jackson in a ceremony on June 1, 2016. With her Ph.D. advisor, Fiamma Straneo, Jackson and colleagues installed moorings in a Greenland fjord to measure temperatures and velocities of currents moving from the open ocean to the Helheim Glacier. They showed that warming ocean waters may be reaching the glacier’s terminus, increasing melting and accelerating the glacier’s flow into the ocean.(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)