Oceanus Online Archive
Boy Scouts Get a Taste of Oceanography
WHOI engineer Paul Fucile took some time off this summer to volunteer at this year’s Boy Scout National Jamboree and give a glimpse of ocean research to boys who had…
Read MorePlastic Particles Permeate the Atlantic
Recent reports of a “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the subtropical waters of the North Pacific Ocean described a floating island as large as Texas—so thick that one could potentially…
Read MoreSalps Catch the Ocean’s Tiniest Organisms
Salps are sometimes called “the ocean’s vacuum cleaners.” The soft, barrel-shaped, transparent animals take in water at one end, filter out tiny plants and animals to eat with internal nets…
Read MoreAlvin Gets an Interior Re-design
For more than four decades, scientists have foregone a few creature comforts to see animals, or volcanoes, or shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. On a typical dive in…
Read MoreA ‘WHOI Way’ of Doing Things
People who have worked at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution know it in their bones. People who work with WHOI feel it, too: There’s a WHOI culture, a WHOI way of…
Read MoreA Torrent of Crabs Running to the Sea
Joanna Gyory’s Ph.D. plans changed completely when she saw the crabs. It was her third or fourth day at the Liquid Jungle Lab, a research facility on an undeveloped island…
Read MoreScience in Service to the Nation
In 1863, as the Civil War raged, Congress established the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an honorary society of scholars that any government department could call upon to “investigate, examine,…
Read MoreThe Call of the Sea
Marshall Swartz’s lab is a Santa’s workshop of engineering gadgetry. Computer keyboards and circuit boards spill from cardboard boxes. Cables, wires, and an assortment of tools hang from wall hooks.…
Read MoreBasic Sea Cable Gets a High-tech Upgrade
In April, when the Deepwater Horizon petroleum drilling rig exploded and oil began gushing from a drill hole almost a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, scientists and engineers…
Read MoreNo Day at the Beach
Field research in oceanography is no day at the beach—even when it’s at the beach. Just ask the students who spent last summer doing research on a swash zone near Seattle.…
Read MoreROV Jason Images the Discovery of the Deepest Explosive Eruption on the Sea Floor
<!– –> West Mata Eruption, 2009 Courtesy NSF, NOAA, and WHOI Advanced Imaging and Visualization Lab
Read MoreA Glacier’s Pace
Time was, saying something moved “at a glacier’s pace” meant it was grindingly slow. No longer. Glaciers don’t move like that anymore. Since the early 1990s, glaciers in Greenland have…
Read MoreLessons from the Haiti Earthquake
When I was a boy growing up in China, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake near the city of Tangshan killed more than 242,000 people and severely injured 170,000 more. More than 7,000…
Read MoreNew Head of WHOI Fleet Comes Aboard
<!– –> Sometimes, a career change has the feel of deferred destiny. “I was in the Caribbean,” said Rob Munier, “at Grand Cayman Island, doing graduate work in the mid-1970s,…
Read MoreA Robot Is Resurrected at Sea
Barely a month after the undersea robot ABE imploded and was lost in the depths, ABE’s “son,” Sentry, suffered fire and flooding that destroyed critical internal components. But a team…
Read MoreUndersea Asphalt Volcanoes Discovered
The dome-like mounds poking up in sonar maps of the seafloor caught scientists’ eyes. They stood out in stark contrast to the surrounding environment off the coast of Santa Barbara,…
Read MoreHow to Survive a Tsunami
In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean that devastated villages and cost 230,000 lives, WHOI geophysicist Jian Lin saw a need for an easy-to-use Web resource…
Read MoreScuba Gear and Origami
Terry Rioux has lived the life aquatic. He took a scuba diving course in college in 1967 and has been diving ever since. He’s lost track of how many dives…
Read MoreMysteries at High Latitudes
We were watching waves, Kjetil Våge and I, from the open transom on the research vessel Knorr. It was mid-October 2008 in the Irminger Sea, where nautical standards are different.…
Read MoreR.I.P. A.B.E
A pioneering deep-sea exploration robot—one of the first successful submersible vehicles that was both unmanned and untethered to surface ships—was lost at sea March 5, 2010, on a research expedition…
Read MoreBacterial ‘Conversations’ Have Impact on Climate
It’s wondrous how the vast and the infinitesimal combine to make our planet work. Scientists at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that bacteria in the ocean, gathering in…
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