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Looking Deep

WHOI’s Fritz Fuglister presents a temperature profile obtained with a bathythermograph, an instrument that measures temperature and depth when dropped from or towed behind a ship. BTs were developed at WHOI in the late 1930s and enabled scientists to begin to decipher the structure of water masses deep below the surface of the ocean. Fuglister’s training as an artist helped him visualize meanders and eddies of the Gulf Stream based on BT data. In 1962 he became the first chairman of the newly formed Physical Oceanography department. (Photo courtesy of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Archives)