By Shawnee Traylor, PhD student in the joint Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution program in Chemical Oceanography / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / Satellites have undoubtedly opened up new ways for scientists to study the ocean, giving us global coverage of the surface of the ocean without ever having to step foot …
By Laetitia Drago, PhD student at Sorbonne Université / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / As a child, I used to spend my summers on the rocks near the water in Villefranche-sur-mer, France, my hands busy with a bucket and a small net. I was fascinated by the organisms surrounding me both on the rocks and in …
By Mikayla Cote, Master's student at the University of Rhode Island / UNITED KINGDOM / After flying to the United Kingdom, the EXPORTS scientists were in quarantine for two weeks prior to embarking on a month-long research cruise. While there was still some last-minute work to be done before departure, for most of us this …
By Diana Fontaine, Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography / NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN / We have about one more week of full science fun left in the North Atlantic NASA EXPORTS campaign. It has certainly been a wild ride at sea given that we've experienced about four storms to …
By Delfina Navarro-Estrada and Shannon Burns, oceanography graduate students at the University of South Florida / NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN / In the sunlit portion of the ocean exist single-celled microscopic organisms called phytoplankton. They are called the ‘grass of the sea' because these tiny plants and algae perform many of the same ecological functions as …
By Ken Buesseler, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution /NORTHERN ATLANTIC OCEAN/ For those of us who grew up watching Gilligan's Island, we all know the fateful story of the "three-hour tour." Well, as this oceanographer knows, that TV storm is not that different from the weather we are facing out here in the North Atlantic on …
By Zachary K. Erickson, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / The ocean is full of eddies – swirling water masses that are the ocean equivalent of hurricanes. In comparison with their atmospheric counterparts, eddies are smaller, longer-lived, and far more numerous: at any given moment, well over 1,000 eddies exist throughout the …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / Pandemics can change the plans of nearly everything, including ocean research. That's exactly what happened with EXPORTS. In 2019, the original North Atlantic Expedition along with its active research projects were cancelled. Despite the setback, …
By Sara Blumberg, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Inia Soto Ramos, Universities Space Research Association / GREENBELT, MARYLAND / When we talk about climate change, we tend to think of lush forests with giant trees that passively trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use them for food in a process called photosynthesis. The …
Madeline Beck, Undergraduate Student in Environmental Science, Montana State University Being part of a NASA research team is an exciting experience! Knowing our work will correspond with further research endeavors and help validate remotely sensed measurements makes us feel like part of a greater effort and team. The research site is in a beautiful part …
