Multimedia Items
Stairway to the Deep
A special, thick-walled tank permits guest investigator Sheng-Qi Zhou from the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology in Guangzhou, China, to observe mixing processes under the pressures experienced deep in the…
Read MoreTeach a Man to Fish
In the 1950s, WHOI biologist Bill Schroeder chartered the Captain Bill II so he could collect and study fish off the Northeast Coast. Here, Schroeder displays a deep-sea fish called chimaera.…
Read MoreTele-present
As part of the TREET (Transforming Remotely Conducted Research Through Ethnography, Education & Rapidly Evolving Technologies) program, early-career scientists and undergraduate students learned how to use telepresence technology during a…
Read MoreClimate Time Machine
Jimmy Bramante, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, collected a core sample from an Atlantic white cedar tree in Cape Cod National Seashore recently. Tree growth is often…
Read MoreA Stormy Past
A new study led by WHOI scientist Jeff Donnelly found that intense hurricanes frequently pounded Cape Cod during the first millennium. Donnelly (in orange shirt) and his research team collected…
Read MoreEarly Life
These rocky formations, called stromatolites, are made by photosynthetic cyanobacteria and other microorganisms. The microbes secrete compounds that bind sediment grains, creating a fine-layered mineral “microfabric.” Stromatolites were among the…
Read MoreAfter Work
There are few observations of ocean-atmosphere interactions in the Southern Hemisphere outside the tropics, yet the Southern Ocean plays a critical role in Earth’s climate and the stability of the…
Read MoreIce Cold
The temperature was -39°F when WHOI engineers John Kemp and Kris Newhall (pictured) and colleagues set up camp on a Beaufort Sea ice floe in March 2014. They were there…
Read MoreAlvin Rising
On October 16, 1968, at the beginning of Dive 308, two steel cables supporting Alvin‘s lowering cage parted. The sub plunged about 15 feet (4.5 meters), then bobbed to the…
Read MoreFour Years On
In March 2011 one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded shook Japan, creating a tsunami that damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant and resulted in the largest unintentional release…
Read MoreNight Watcher
In 2006 MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Kelly Rakow Sutherland, who studied zooplankton at the Liquid Jungle Lab in Panama, photographed this box jellyfish while on a night scuba dive. Soft-bodied…
Read MoreTight Squeeze
In August 2014, R/V Knorr transited through Prince Christian Sound, a 60-mile (100-kilometer) strait in southern Greenland that narrows in places to only 1,500 feet (500 meters). The sound connects the…
Read MoreUndersea Telescope
This stealthy-looking vehicle is a VPR, or Video Plankton Recorder, which images plankton and particles as it is towed through the water while software on the ship automatically identifies the organisms…
Read MoreRevealed Warmth
At an open house that she hosted in the WHOI Geophysical Fluid Dynamics (GFD) Laboratory, scientist Claudia Cenedese invited visitors to have their portrait taken with a thermal-imaging camera, which…
Read MoreNature in Miniature
The Mesocosm Lab at WHOI is a unique facility that gives scientists the ability to set up realistic natural environments, but on a smaller scale. An underground system draws seawater…
Read MoreFrom the Archives
Research vessels Bear and Atlantis docked at the WHOI pier in 1955. Built during WWII as a troop carrier in the South Pacific, Bear was chartered by the Institution in…
Read MoreTip of the Profiler
Below this buoy drifting atop an ice floe hangs the rest of an instrument called an Ice-Tethered Profiler (ITP). The instrument, developed at WHOI, has a motorized device that rides up…
Read MoreVisit a Vent
Exhibit preparator Sean Murtha installs a new exhibit at the Ocean Science Exhibit Center entitled The Deep Sea. The exhibit was orginally displayed at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn., and replicates…
Read MoreEverything Must Go
Chen Cai, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis organizes one of the 16 seismic stations that a team led partly by WHOI geophysicist Ralph Stephen set up…
Read MoreTreasure of Information
A rock sample, collected from the Central Indian Ridge, a mountain chain running through the Indian Ocean, sparkles with information. It’s interior is lined with a fine-grained mineral called chalcopyrite as…
Read MoreNo Swimming
A floating piece of ice in the Arctic Ocean matches the shades of white-sand beaches in tropical water, but the temperature would be quite a shock to anyone who was…
Read MorePropelled by the Sinking of Cold, Salty waters
The Great Ocean Conveyor is propelled by the sinking of cold, salty (and therefore denser) waters in the North Atlantic Ocean (blue arrows). That creates a void that pulls warm,…
Read MoreOysters to the Rescue
Excess nitrogen and other nutrients in coastal waters on Cape Cod can lead to algal blooms that deplete oxygen and disturb natural ecosystems. Hauke Kite-Powell is a WHOI Marine Policy Center research…
Read MoreMixing it Up
In WHOI’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFD), scientists study small versions of ocean currents, eddies, and flows. Scientist Claudia Cenedese and graduate students in the Physical Oceanography Department held public…
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