Multimedia Items

Sediment traps are containers that scientists place in the ocean to collect tiny sediment or larger accumulations called “marine snow” —bits of organic matter, dead sea creatures, shells, dust and…

Physical oceanographer Amy Bower, left, and research associate David Fisichella display a RAFOS Float.  These floats are neutrally buoyant, free drifting instruments, which are launched from a ship in the…

Dave Owen developed an interest in deep-sea photography — then a field in its infancy — early in his career at WHOI. During a cruise to the Mediterranean and Aegean…

A McKay’s Bunting is a special sight. Named in honor of American naturalist Charles McKay, these birds summer and breed on a few remote islands in the Bering Sea, and…

Pieces of plastic collected by one plankton net tow in the surface waters of the Atlantic Ocean at 30°27’N, 55°42.2’W in October, 1992 (penny shown for scale). These samples are…

Research Engineer Matt Heintz tests the capibilities of a manipulator arm that he helped develop for the new deep-diving vehicle Nereus in the WHOI Deep Submergence Lab. In this case,…

Women from Unguja Ukuu-Tindini on the island of Zanzibar off Tanzania examine a shellfish farm that they are learning to set up and tend. Hauke Kite-Powell, a Marine Policy Center…

Hanumant Singh, of the WHOI Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department, tests a newly-built SeaBED autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) off the WHOI dock in May 2009. Eight of these AUVs…

The crew aboard the R/V Atlantis handle a line during recovery of an ocean bottom seismometer (OBS) in January 2009.  The OBS was just one of 41 deployed along the Quebrada,…

Oil washed into the West Falmouth marsh and tide pools after a 1969 spill, with disastrous consequences for these small marine animals in a tidal pool. Though the marsh now…

Daniel Gomez-Ibañez is an engineer at WHOI who specializes in developing battery systems to power deep-submergence vehicles, including the new “hybrid” deep-sea explorer Nereus, which successfully dove to Challenger Deep…

Claudia Cenedese, scientist in the WHOI physical oceanography department, studies how water in the ocean moves. But she does it inside the box—by doing laboratory experiments that simulate oceans in…

It took a village of engineers to build the new hybrid deep-sea vehicle Nereus, which dove to 10,902 meters (6.8 miles) in the western Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench on May…

The Aries, a 93 foot ketch, arrived in Woods Hole in March of 1959 as a gift from R.J. Reynolds. She was refitted as a research vessel by June and…

Joint Program graduate student Kristin Pangallo’s childhood wish to work with whales and dolphins branched into a bachelor’s degree in chemistry then a job as a research technician at WHOI.…

Siphonophores, relatives of jellyfish made of compound units, drift in the endless space of the open ocean. Their many tentacles, studded with batteries of stinging cells, form a beaded curtain…

A trip to the snow? Actually, it’s mineral, not ice, as WHOI graduate program student Evelyn Mervine collects recently-deposited carbonate from a highly alkaline spring in the Samail Ophiolite—an area…

Working out on the ice in the reassuring presence of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, scientist Katrin Iken (left, from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks)—assisted by technician Pat Kelly (right,…