Oceanus Online Archive
Lurking Benignly on the Seafloor, the ‘Yeti’ Crab is Discovered
Biologist Cindy Van Dover routinely finds new, unusual creatures when she dives to unexplored areas of the ocean in the deep-sea submersible Alvin. So she was not particularly fazed when […]
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ABE—The Autonomous Benthic Explorer
The pioneering deep-submergence vehicle, now 10 years old, continues to demonstrate its versatility on each new cruise.
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Flying Blind in the Ice Factory
Al Plueddemann wants to push the envelope and fly a robotic vehicle into the wild blue under the polar ice cap.
North of Alaska lies a key region for understanding Earth’s […]
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What Is the Alvin Training Program Like?
Like many boys who spend their youths throwing baseballs in Massachusetts parks, Tarantino dreamed of playing for the Red Sox. When not pitching, he liked to take apart his toys […]
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Alvin‘s Pilots
Forty summers ago in the Bahamas, two men climbed inside a 23-foot white submarine named Alvin and drove it to a depth 6,000 feet, a dive that certified them as […]
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Seafloor Reconnaissance Reveals Hidden Dangers Off Antarctica
For five frigid weeks in April and May 2005, a team of scientists and engineers sat in inflatable boats off the coast of the western Antarctic Peninsula, steering clear of […]
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Newest Alvin Pilot Comes Aboard
Gavin Eppard became WHOI?s newest Alvin pilot on March 21, 2005.
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A Glide Across the Gulf Stream
News of the first successful Gulf Stream crossing by a glider last November—and the launching today (Thursday, March 24) of Spray’s seven-week round-trip mission from Bermuda across the Gulf Stream and back—has caused a ripple among scientists, who recall the dream of famed WHOI oceanographer Henry Stommel.
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Robo-Sailors
In the mid-1990s, the Navy began funding research for small, robotic vehicles to perform unmanned reconnaissance in coastal waters. At WHOI, that helped spark the development of REMUS (Remote Environmental Monitoring UnitS), designed and built by Chris von Alt, Ben Allen, and colleagues in the Oceanographic Systems Laboratory.
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Realizing the Dreams of da Vinci and Verne
Leonardo da Vinci made the first drawings of a submarine more than 500 years ago, and Jules Verne published 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1875. But only in the past few decades has the dizzying pace of technological advances allowed us to realize their dreams of exploring the ocean depths and taking humans to the seafloor.
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Unique Vehicles for a Unique Environment
For climatologists and physical oceanographers, it is often said that the Arctic is a canary in the environmental coal mine. In the isolated Arctic Ocean Basin, a variety of oceanographic and other processes have conspired to create a layer of cold, salty water called a halocline, which shields the sea ice from underlying warmer waters that would otherwise melt it.
Read MoreVoyage to Vailulu’u
It was like a pirate’s treasure map. A dotted line clearly showed the trail, but at the end of it, no “X” marked the spot.
Then a telltale clue caught Stan […]
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“Nothing Could Diminish the Excitement Of Seeing the Animals for the First Time”
The scientists who made the surprising discovery of teeming life around hydrothermal vents of the Galápagos Rift in 1977 were geologists and geochemists. They had not expected to find spectacular colonies of previously unknown, large animals on the deep seafloor.
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WHOI and Access to the Sea
In the mid-term future, two WHOI ships (Knorr in about 2006 and Oceanus in about 2009) will reach the end of their planned service lives. There is general agreement that WHOI should work to replace them with two vessels.
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“What a Year!”
Four technologies that have been developing separately for some time were brought together this year by WHOI’s Deep Submergence Laboratory (DSL) to serve three very different user communities. With images from the towed vehicle Argo II and the remotely operated vehicle Jason, DSL scientists and engineers created mosaic images of a sunken British cargo ship and 20-meter-tall hydrothermal vent chimneys, both in the Pacific Ocean, and ancient shipwreck sites in the Mediterranean. The three expeditions thus served the marine safety, scientific, and archaeological communities.
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The Magnetic Thickness of a Recent Submarine Lava Flow
Submarine lava flows and their associated narrow feeder conduits known as dikes constitute the basic building blocks of the upper part of the ocean crust. We are only beginning to understand how lava erupts and forms on the seafloor by flooding topographic lows, flowing through channels or tubes, centralizing into volcanoes, or some combination of all of these.
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