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Ocean science news, explainers, and statistics covering marine environments, currents, climate, coasts, seafloor research, and the changing global ocean.

Marie Tharp with Al Ballard and Marty Weiss during the 1968 USNS Kane expedition

Oceans Explainer

In 1956, Marie Tharp published a hand-drawn North Atlantic seafloor map after recognizing a V-shaped rift in six depth profiles and its alignment with earthquake patterns helped reshape the evidence for a moving ocean floor

The Atlantic Ocean once hid its largest landscape in plain sight. Beneath the waves lay a long mountain chain, deep plains and a valley running along the middle of the ridge. In the early 1950s, Marie Tharp saw the clue in six ship-track profiles. Each showed a V-shaped dip near the center. Together, the marks…

Pacific Ocean seen from space by the Suomi NPP satellite

Oceans Explainer

First close-up images reveal Shackleton’s last ship on the Labrador seafloor

The stakes of a century-old expedition story have come into focus on the floor of the Labrador Sea. A July 8 announcement from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reports the first close-up images of Quest, the final ship of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton. Cameras on the human-occupied submersible DSV Alvin…

View of the vast ocean and horizon from an offshore platform under cloudy skies

Oceans Explainer

In 1962 engineers launched a 355-foot research platform that flooded its tanks until 300 feet pointed straight down, turning FLIP into a nearly motionless ocean laboratory that served scientists for 61 years before its 2023 retirement

Ocean scientists need a steady platform when their instruments are tracking faint sounds, subtle currents and the exchange between sea and sky. FLIP answered that need in an extraordinary way. Three hundred feet of a 355-foot platform could disappear beneath the Pacific in less than half an hour, leaving 55 feet above the water like…

Deep-sea manned vehicle for oceanographic research and rescue operations

Oceans Explainer

In 1974, Alvin and two French submersibles descended into the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, made 44 dives and collected 100,000 photographs and 3,000 pounds of rock while giving scientists a close view of how new ocean crust takes shape

In 1974, a deep ridge in the Atlantic became a working field site for people inside small research vehicles. Three submersibles reached the seafloor near the Azores and watched a basic planetary process at close range. Lava had poured through cracks, cooled and helped create fresh ocean crust between moving plates. That direct view mattered…

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