Multimedia Items

MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Matthew Osman (left) and U.S. Ice Drilling Program driller Mike Waszkiewicz move an ice core barrel into place during a storm in West Greenland. Osman and…

In January 1980, the human-occupied submersible Alvin made its 1,000th dive to the seafloor during an expedition to the Galapagos Rift. In November 2018, Alvin made its 5,000th dive. In…

As part of his Semester at WHOI (SAW) working with WHOI scientist Joel Llopiz’s lab, Matt Stefanak, a senior at Middlebury College, collected fish larvae in St. John, U.S. Virgin…

The morning after the human-occupied submersible Alvin made its historic 5,000th dive, it made it’s 5,001st and continued its 50-plus years of scientific research and exploration of the deep ocean. (Photo…

Like different human social groups, short-finned pilot whales living off the coast of Hawai’i have their own sorts of vocal dialects, according to a new study by WHOI researchers. “It’s…

Giant clams of the Tridacna genus have muscular mantles whose tissue can come in splendid colors, such as this bright blue. Eight species of Tridacna, most threatened by overharvesting, live…

Sound carries messages in the watery medium of the ocean. To listen in, scientists use underwater microphones, or hydrophones, to record calls from whales or sound waves from airguns towed…

Shortly after a WHOI-French-led expedition found the wreck of Titanic on the seafloor in 1985, the Navy commissioned a return mission to test a small remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with…

Viewed in polarized light and magnified 10 times, this thin-section sample of a skeleton of a Pacific reef-building coral, Acropora gemmifera, looks more like abstract art. The skeleton is made…

Nathan Mollica (left), a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, and WHOI scientist Weifu Guo examine a sample cored from the skeleton of a coral. They put the cores…

This souvenir envelope, called a dive cover, went to 2,013 meters in the ocean on dive 5,000 of the Human Occupied Vehicle Alvin. Join WHOI, the USPS, and the DSV Alvin…

The deep-sea exploration vehicle called Sentry has been festooned with decorations and “faces” over the years, often thanks to WHOI engineer Justin Fujii whose artistic medium is electrical tape. Sentry is an autonomous underwater vehicle…

A WHOI scientific team follows a ridge above the Koettlitz Glacier en route to conducting research in Antarctica in December 2007. The sun is due north over the Ross Sea,…

In 1949, WHOI biologist William Schevill (right) and his wife Barbara Lawrence used a crude hydrophone and a dictating machine to record beluga whales from a small boat in the…

Crowds of family members, WHOI staff, and other well-wishers—including hundreds of journalists and 18 film crews—thronged the pier at WHOI in September 1985, as the research vessel Knorr returned from…

This curious, colorful image may look a little like five bananas, but it is actually a spectrogram of sound waves recorded by a hydrophone in the ocean. More particularly, it…