Guardians of the Seven Seas

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is working hard to safeguard our oceans, and our planet.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the largest independent, non-profit ocean research organization in the world. We asked Dr. Daniel Zitterbart, Associate Scientist and the Director of the Ecosystem Remote Sensing Laboratory at WHOI, to share some of the incredible things his organization is doing, and help us better understand why the oceans are so vital to all of us, wherever we live on planet earth.

WHOI (pronounced hoo-ee) is one of the world’s leading ocean science organizations and almost 100 years old; yet in human terms we’re small. About a thousand people, including scientists, engineers, ship crew, technicians, students and staff, make up WHOI.

What’s outsized is our reach. WHOI operates its own research fleet — the R/V Atlantis, the R/V Neil Armstrong and the coastal vessel R/V Tioga — along with the human-occupied submersible Alvin, which carries researchers to the deep seafloor; the remotely operated vehicle Jason; and a growing family of robots. WHOI has researchers and projects working in the Arctic, the Antarctic, the tropics, and everywhere in between. So, we have tremendous range and capability.

Dan Zitterbart, Associate Scientist at WHOI, in Antarctica. Photo by ©Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The ocean isn’t just a feature of the planet. It’s the reason the planet works.

The ocean affects us in so many ways. Roughly half the oxygen produced on earth has come from microscopic plants drifting in seawater — phytoplankton, most of them too small to see.

And since the 1970s, the ocean has absorbed more than 90% of the extra heat trapped in the earth by human-caused warming, and roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted since the Industrial Revolution.

Then weather. The ocean supplies most of the moisture that falls as rain on land, and ocean currents help make weather in places like northern Europe far milder than that of other regions at similar latitudes. Monsoons, hurricanes, and droughts – these are all profoundly shaped by the ocean.

Three billion people get a significant share of their animal protein from the sea. And the overwhelming majority of world trade moves on it. Most international data traffic runs through cables lying on the seabed.

On the front lines of national security

Here’s something that surprises many people: Due to its strategic importance, ocean science and defense have been connected since the early days. WHOI was barely a decade old when the Second World War arrived, and much of the modern science of underwater sound — how it bends, scatters, and carries — was studied here at WHOI, because navies urgently needed to know these things. Detecting submarines made it necessary to understand how sound travels underwater.

That relationship – between the Defense Department and WHOI – never went away. We have a Masters Program with MIT specifically for Naval officers. We are proud of the connection and our legacy with the Navy.

How our oceans drive the world economy

In one way or another, just about everyone has a financial relationship with the ocean. If you’re moving ships, you need to know the sea state, the ice, the currents, the temperature structure that determines how far sound travels and where a sonar can and cannot see. If you’re laying or protecting the undersea cables that carry the world’s financial transactions and internet traffic, you need to know the seafloor they sit on.

Ocean research generates technology: robotics, sensors, acoustics, materials that survive pressure and salt, imaging systems. Our whale-detection cameras began as a research question and are now a commercial product used to help protect whales from ship strikes.

A longstanding partnership with Polar Latitudes Expeditions (PLX)

The bottleneck in polar science is not ideas. It’s ship time. A dedicated research vessel working in Antarctica is expensive, there are only so many of them, and they are booked years out. Expedition ships are already going to some of the places we want to sample, repeatedly, across a whole season, year after year. From a scientist’s point of view that is close to ideal for specific research questions, especially to build baselines. That’s why our relationship with Polar Latitudes Expeditions is so important to us. The partnership began in 2019 and grew from there. The reason it grew is that the Polar Latitudes crew and expedition teams were genuinely invested. Deploying a mooring off a working expedition vessel requires people who want it to succeed. They were all in.

The partnership between us continues to give our science a platform it could not otherwise have. We’ve been able to record seasons of data we could not otherwise have afforded; gained access to parts of the Peninsula that are hard to reach; and (not a small thing) helped hundreds of people each year go home having watched science actually happening, rather than having simply read about it.

Our ongoing partnership with PLX encompasses a number of projects and new technologies, with whales usually the big winners. For example, we installed a WhaleSpotter, which is an automated thermal imaging system, on the Discoverer. An infrared camera scans the water ahead and detects the heat of a whale’s blow against the cold Antarctic waters. We get automated measurements of whale density, while protecting the whales from a vessel-strike by alerting the bridge crew in real-time, so the ship can route around them or slow down.

We also collect water samples and measure dimethyl sulfide, or DMS — the compound responsible for that unmistakable smell of the sea. DMS matters far beyond its smell: once it enters the atmosphere it helps seed cloud droplets, which affects how much sunlight the region reflects.

We measure sound, too. We deploy and recover acoustic moorings that sit on the seabed recording the underwater soundscape continuously — whales, ice, weather, and ships. That gives us both a baseline for what Antarctic waters actually sound like, and a direct measurement of what vessels add to it.

Science is a lot of things – boring isn’t one of them.

If anyone thinks science is boring, they’re probably thinking about textbooks. Science in a textbook is a list of settled facts, and yes, a list of settled facts is dull. The actual work is the opposite: it is entirely made of things nobody knows yet. And there’s the moment that keeps people in this profession. You open a file and hear a recording of a place no human has ever listened to. For a few minutes, before you tell anyone, you are the only person alive who knows what it sounds like down there. That feeling is genuinely addictive, and it doesn’t fade.

There’s plenty of good news, too, and more to come.

A lot of what you hear about the state of the environment is negative. But there’s good news, too. In January 2026, the High Seas Treaty entered into force, after crossing the sixty-ratification threshold. For the first time there is a legal mechanism to establish protected areas in international waters — which is to say, in roughly two-thirds of the ocean, an area that until now had essentially no framework for protection at all.

South Atlantic humpbacks were hunted to a few hundred animals. They now number in the tens of thousands, close to their pre-whaling population. Every humpback anybody photographs from a Polar Latitudes deck is alive because of decisions taken in the 1970s and 80s by people who never saw the outcome.

The ozone hole is healing, on schedule, because a global treaty worked. Ship noise is a solvable engineering problem, and the industry has begun to take it seriously.

New technologies will bring new breakthroughs, too. There is already a global array of thousands of drifting robotic floats profiling the ocean’s temperature, salinity and increasingly its chemistry, reporting by satellite, continuously, without anyone aboard. Gliders can fly for months on almost no power.

Machine learning is another big theme. Our whale detection already runs automatically, but the direction of travel is real-time classification: a system that not only notices an animal but identifies what it is, on the spot, and tells the bridge. Once detection is instant, avoidance becomes routine rather than heroic.

Help us protect our oceans, because they’re your oceans, too.

You don’t have to work at WHOI, or be a career scientist, to contribute to real and meaningful science. Become a data point. On your next voyage, if you photograph a whale’s fluke and upload it to Happywhale, that image is matched against a global catalogue and becomes a real sighting record used by real researchers. Travelers have contributed enormously to what we know about individual whales’ movements.

Choose your operators thoughtfully. If you travel to the poles, go with companies that carry scientists, belong to IAATO, and take the wildlife-distance rules seriously. Look for operators with science programs you can participate in.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a non-profit that depends on support from environmentally conscious people like yourself. Visit their website to learn more about their work and consider supporting them with a contribution.