Oceanus Online Archive
Woman on Board
When Meghan Donohue decided to become a mooring technician—a job usually done by men—she knew she would face challenges. Donohue is the first woman to join the Mooring Operations and Engineering Group at WHOI. She is also a new mother. In an interview, she describes some of her experiences working on research cruises and balancing family life with a career at sea.
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Warming Ocean Drove Catastrophic Australian Floods
New research by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution physical oceanographer Caroline Ummenhofer and Australian scientists suggests that long-term warming of the Indian and Pacific Oceans is increasing the risk of heavy rains in the region.
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How Would ‘On-Call’ Buoys Work?
WHOI engineers are developing a new kind of lobster trap buoy that could help keep whales from getting tangled in fishing gear. Click on the numbers above to learn more.
On a mobile […]
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Whale-safe Fishing Gear
WHOI engineers are developing a new kind of lobster trap buoy that could help keep whales from getting tangled in fishing gear.
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Let There Be Laser Light
WHOI scientists are developing new sensors using lasers to detect methane, carbon dioxide, and other critical environmental gases in the air and under the ocean.
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A Slithery Ocean Mystery
It’s an enduring mystery: How do tiny eel larvae make their way from the Sargasso Sea to coastal freshwater estuaries where they grow up?
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Life Dwells Deep Within Earth’s Crust
Aboard a drillship in the Indian Ocean, geologists pursued their mission to bore a hole thousands of feet through the seafloor to reach the Moho, the mysterious and never-before-penetrated boundary […]
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Attracted to Magnetics
Maurice Tivey has probably endured more than a few bad puns, like the one in our headline, after he tells people what he does for a living. A geologist at […]
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The Quest for the Moho
For more than a century, scientists have made several attempts to drill a hole through Earth’s ocean crust to an interior layer of rock in Earth’s interior called the mantle.
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Ocean Observatories System Is Up and Running
The Ocean Observatories Initiative has reached a major milestone: Its network of ocean sensor systems is now fully operational and sending a broad, continuous stream of data back to shore. Funded by the National Science Foundation with a planned life of 25 years, the OOI provides online access to a growing trove of multidisciplinary oceanographic data, freely available to researchers, educators, and the public worldwide.
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Signs of Big Change in the Arctic
The climate in the Arctic region once predictably shifted back and forth between two regimes. But now the system seems to be stuck.
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No Stone Unturned
WHOI iologist Joel Llopiz is taking advantage of information stored in the tiny “ear stones” of larval and juvenile river herring to learn more about why the once-ubiquitous species is having difficulty re-populating lakes and streams in New England.
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Shark Tales
Sharks are some of the largest fish in the ocean, but their movements and behavior have remained largely hidden from people.
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Beneath the Sea, the Galápagos Reveal More Marvels
The Galápagos Islands have offered biologists a natural laboratory ever since Charles Darwin’s day, but they’re also a frontier for geologists and volcanologists to test theories. The thirteen major volcanic […]
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Can Animals Live Without Oxygen?
In 2010, a research team garnered headlines when it published evidence of finding the first animals living in oxygen-free conditions at the bottom of the sea. But a new study […]
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As Bay Warms, Harmful Algae Bloom
Warming coastal waters off southern Massachusetts are worsening the effects of pollution from septic systems, wastewater treatment plants, and fertilizer runoff—and causing a rise in harmful algal blooms.
Researchers at Woods […]
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Crabs Swarm on the Seafloor
Expeditions to the tropics and Antarctica have turned up crab populations—for better or worse—in unexpected parts of the globe.
At the Hannibal Bank Seamount, an 1,180-foot-high undersea mountain off Panana’s Pacific, […]
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Tagging a Squishy Squid
For more than a decade, researchers have been tagging large marine mammals such as dolphins and whales to reveal their behavior. But tagging small, soft animals such as jellyfish and […]
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The Bottom of the Ocean On Top of Your Coffee Table
Here’s a way to journey to the seafloor without leaving your living room or classroom. Five deep-sea scientists have created a comprehensive, lavishly illustrated book that transports readers to Earth’s […]
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Illuminating an Unexplored Undersea Universe
Twenty-five years ago, the Hubble Telescope was launched to look out to the vast darkness of outer space. It captured thousands of images of previously unknown stars, galaxies, and clouds […]
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Mummified Microbes
Scientists have found evidence that microbes can thrive deep below the seafloor—sustained by chemicals produced by reactions between seawater and rocks in Earth’s mantle.
It’s difficult to gain direct access to […]
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A New Eye on Deep-Sea Fisheries
Imagine that officials charged with setting deer-hunting limits had to assess the herd’s abundance by flying over forests at night. That’s a little like what the National Marine Fisheries Services […]
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A Luxury-Laden Shipwreck from 65 B.C.
Scientists returned in 2015 and 2016 to the wreck of a 180-foot ship that sank off the Greek island of Antikythera around 65 B.C., and recovered luxury items that included […]
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A New Whale Species Is Discovered in the Wild
Scientists have discovered a thriving population of Omura’s whales—a species that hadn’t even been identified until 2003 and had never before been documented in the wild.
Omura’s whales were misidentified as […]
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