WHOI in the News
Can we harness the natural power of the ocean to fight climate change?
A top priority for science is to advance our understanding and monitoring of the oceans so that we can measure impacts and viability of these potential solutions. Specifically, this means developing more complete understanding of how the ocean works at this scale, how it cycles carbon from the surface to deep waters, and how the oceans are changing. With this new capability, we can test the effectiveness and impacts of these ocean CDR approaches.
Columbia to Launch $25 Million AI-based Climate Modeling Center
To bring greater precision to climate modeling and encourage societies to prepare for the inevitable disruptions ahead, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Columbia to lead a climate modeling center called Learning the Earth with Artificial Intelligence and Physics (LEAP). In collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the center will develop the next generation of data-driven physics-based climate models.
Need to Avoid Carbon ‘Gold Rush’ in the Ocean: Peter de Menocal
WHOI president and director Peter de Menocal speaks on the urgency and scale of ocean carbon capture and storage solutions.
WHOI Named As NSF Science And Tech Center
“The basic idea is that we’re trying to understand the molecules and the microbes that are really important for transforming about a quarter of Earth’s photosynthetic carbon every year. That area, that particular pool of carbon, has been really hard to study because it turns over really fast, which means it’s produced and consumed in very short time periods. There’s not much of it at any one point in time, so we have had a very hard time analytically pulling it out of seawater, characterizing it, trying to understand which bacteria or phytoplankton or microbes, in general, are important for controlling it and so on.”
Explorers, Scientists, and Advocates James Cameron, Ray Dalio, Peter de Menocal, and Dr. Edith Widder to Discuss Ocean Twilight Zone for Public Unveiling of Historic Art Installation
″ Illuminating the Abyss ” will take place on Tuesday, September 21, at 7:30 PM ET. The event will be hosted by renowned ocean research organization Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and moderated by climate reporter and author Tatiana Schlossberg.
Here Come the First Responders … And the Engineers?
“Many of those interactions only occur during the biggest storms, when the surge and the waves inundate land and there’s heavy rainfall,” says Britt Raubenheimer, a coastal oceanographer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
‘Mysterious Boxes’ Are Washing Up On Texas Beaches. What Are They?
Similar objects have been found on the opposite side of the Gulf, in Florida, and a bit further south.
Sunlight Exposure for 100 Hours or Less Melts Plastics, Breaks Them Down Into Smaller Soup of New Chemicals
Microplastics are considered a major environmental hazard that is produced from the disintegration of plastics. Sadly, many of them end up in oceans and pollute or contaminate the waters and marine life. Now, a new study shows that long sunlight exposure could break down plastics and transform them into a soup of new chemicals and eliminate the hazards of microplastics.
A Recent Reversal Discovered in the Response of Greenland’s Ice Caps to Climate Change
New collaborative research from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and five partner institutions (University of Arizona, University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University, Desert Research Institute and University of Bergen), published on September 9, 2021, in Nature Geoscience, reveals that during past periods glaciers and ice caps in coastal west Greenland experienced climate conditions much different than the interior of Greenland.
The Right Tools for Right Whales
Lonati’s methodology involves looking for whales, then hovering the university’s dual-gimbal DJI Matrice 210 V2 drone over a whale when it surfaces, capturing high-resolution images using an RGB camera at 20m above the ocean surface, then descending to 10m to capture a reading of the whale’s internal body temperature via its blowhole using an infrared camera. It is worth noting that drones have been deployed by researchers before to gather information about whales.
Mauritius incident was world’s first major spill of very low sulfur fuel oil
“When we analyzed several other Low Sulfur Fuel Oils, we found some contained higher concentrations of toxic components than the oil discharged in the Mauritius spill, so more research will be needed before we can conclude that all the oil types within this new class pose less of a threat to marine ecosystems than heavy fuel oils.”
‘No easy answers’ WHOI building project designed for sea-level rise
“This is critical infrastructure to what we do,” said Rob Munier, WHOI vice president for marine facilities and operations. “Others can contemplate alternatives, including retreat (from the waterfront), but we have to be there. It’s part of our ability to do our mission.”
‘Tiger Stripes’ on a Saturn Moon Could Be Even More Unique Than Previously Thought
Icy moons that have (or are thought to have) subsurface oceans are common in the outer solar system. For example, Jupiter has several of them. These form when gravity from the planet they orbit stretches and squeezes their interior.
Rise and fall of water blisters offers glimpse beneath Greenland’s thick ice sheet
The findings could shed light on how climate change will affect Greenland’s vast frozen interior as the planet warms and surface melting increase.
‘The concept looks fairly solid.’ Researchers test new clay process to kill red tide cells
The process, known as clay flocculation, involves spraying a mixture of clay particles and seawater onto the red tide algae.
WHOI Advancing a Seaweed Solution to Develop New Kelp Strains
Aquaculture already supplies more than half of the world’s seafood consumed by humans, with seaweed totaling 27% of annual global aquaculture tonnage.
Hurricane Bob struck 30 years ago. Scientists unsure how climate change will alter Atlantic hurricanes?
When our time comes, will the Cape and Islands be looking at something a lot bigger and stronger than Bob, or Carol, or the Hurricane of ’38 or even the Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635?
Scientists Evaluate the Evidence for an Intensifying Indian Ocean Water Cycle
“Scientific communities need to come together to have discussions about what we can tell from our data, how we can compare apples and oranges, and how we can bring all this information together to have a better understanding of the entire Indian Ocean system,” Ummenhofer says.
Our future is in our hands
It is “unequivocal” that human influence has warmed the planet and that widespread, rapid changes have already occurred in every region of the globe as a result. The scale and rate of changes are “unprecedented” in relation to the past hundreds to thousands of years. And there are more changes on the way.
Climate change accelerates emperor penguin extinction risk
Extreme events observed through recent satellite records amplified the projected declines from previous studies, researchers said.
How an underwater robot could help reveal mysteries of the deep
Enter Mesobot, a state-of-the-art aquatic explorer designed to help unravel some of those unknowns, and improve our existing knowledge.
‘Rolls-Royce’ of shark cameras can extend to turtles, whales, seals and squid for ocean’s big picture
A high-tech SharkCam invented by a Cape Cod researcher offers an unprecedented window into the lives of the ocean’s toothy predators, and can also extend to seals, whales, turtles and squid for a big-picture view of precious ecosystems and how to protect them. “These vehicles, these underwater robots that look like highly complex systems are just an extension of yourself to be able go where people can’t go, and there’s no limitation to what they can do,” said Amy Kukulya, research engineer and principal investigator at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Melting ice imperils 98% of Emperor penguin colonies by 2100
WASHINGTON (AP) — With climate change threatening the sea ice habitat of Emperor penguins, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday announced a proposal to list the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. “The lifecycle of Emperor penguins is tied to having stable sea ice, which they need to breed, to feed and to molt,” said Stephanie Jenouvrier, a penguin ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
What Happens to Marine Life When There Isn’t Enough Oxygen?
In September of 2017, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution postdoctoral scholar Maggie Johnson was conducting an experiment with a colleague in Bocas del Toro off the Caribbean coast of Panama. After sitting on a quiet, warm open ocean, they snorkeled down to find a peculiar layer of murky, foul-smelling water about 10 feet below the surface, with brittle stars and sea urchins, which are usually in hiding, perching on the tops of coral. This unique observation prompted a collaborative study explained in a new paper published on July 26, 2021, in Nature Communications analyzing what this foggy water layer is caused by, and the impact it has on life at the bottom of the seafloor.