WHOI's Sune Nielsen walks you back to a time when the ocean was a very different place, but also very similar to today in one important way.

Scientists knew something strange happened when they heard reports of a raft of floating rock near New Zealand back in 2012. That raft eventually grew to around 150 square miles—remains of the largest underwater volcanic eruption in the 20th or 21st century to date, bigger even than Mount St. Helens.

In 2015, folks from WHOI, University of Tasmania, UC Berkeley, University of Otago, NIWA New Zealand, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and Georgia Tech took a close-up look at the site of a rare under water eruption and this is what they found. bit.ly/Havre-eruption National Science Foundation (NSF) #NSFfunded

Bomb-cyclone Grayson passed directly over the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative Pioneer Array about 100 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard last week, giving us an inside look at what a storm of that size does to the ocean, from the wavetops to the seafloor. There’s much more data than this to sift through, but this gives a look how much and how quickly conditions changed as the storm approached and passed over. It will also show us how the ocean rebounds over time. The met plot shows the rapid pressure drop on Jan 4—the "bomb" part of the storm, in which pressure drops at least 1mb/hr for 24 hours (here, it dropped 60 mb). Winds are shown as the north and east "direction to" components, so initially you see W-NW winds bringing warmer air. Peak winds were about 20m/s (40 kt) and from the NE (a traditional nor’easter). As the storm passed, winds rotated to the E-SE, and the temperature dropped. During peak winds, sea surface temperatures rose. This could mean that subsurface temperatures were warmer than the surface, so mixing resulted in warming, or it could be something else that will require a closer look at data from nearby moorings in the array. The wave plot shows rapid wave growth from just a few feet to about 8 meters (26 ft.) significant and 11 meters (36 ft.) peak. The wave direction "jumps" (rotated through 0 deg.) from the direction of the background sea (~280 deg) to westward (~100 deg) as the seas build in response to winds from the west. As the winds rotated counterclockwise, the seas followed, ending up to the E-SE.

Motivation to Map: A Quest to Understand What the Earth Really Looks Like

Motivation to Map: A Quest to Understand What the Earth Really Looks Like

It's 2018. You should know what biogeochemistry is and why studying it is critical to understanding the ocean.

Scientists find surprising evidence of rapid changes in the Arctic.

The “bomb cyclone” currently working its way up the East Coast (see previous post) is mostly driven by atmospheric conditions. But the storm’s track and growing intensity means we expect it to have a significant impact on the coastal and near-shore ocean, as well. The Ocean Observatories Initiative Pioneer Array 100 miles south of Martha's Vineyard is gathering data from the surface to the seafloor round-the-clock and transmitting that data to shore in real-time for scientists and forecasters to measure and predict the changes in the ocean long-term or in the short-term as a result of events like this—and what these mean for us on shore. Below is a plot of growing wave height at the array. All the data is available online and we'll post more over the next few days.

The East Coast is in the midst of a "bomb cyclone." Before you think this is another hyperbolic term coined by over-eager television weather forecasters, it actually has a definition. This journal article from 1980 comes courtesy of Steve Jayne.

North Atlantic right whales are extremely endangered. With just 100 or so breeding females left alive, the North Atlantic right whale could become extinct in just over 20 years. “We don’t have decades to fix this problem,” WHOI researcher Mark Baumgartner said. “Because of the pace of regulatory changes, we only have a couple years. And the longer we wait, the harder the problem will be to fix.”