Archive for April 2015

On a recent field expedition to the remote western end of Kwajalein Atoll in the central Pacific, the team encountered a different sort of problem than what they’re used to.  There was no safe place for the boat to land.  The shallow reef flat and heavy surf prevented the 50′ boat supplied by the US…

WHOI geologist Jeff Donnelly and research assistant Richard Sullivan recently joined Texas A&M University at Galveston (TAMUG) geologist Pete van Hengstum and undergraduate student Tyler Winkler in collecting cores from Thatchpoint Bluehole. It is thought that blueholes form when rising seas flood a sinkhole, formed when limestone bedrock is dissolved from below by groundwater and collapses. The team collected…

Jimmy Bramante, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, collected a core sample from an Atlantic white cedar tree in Cape Cod National Seashore recently. Tree growth is often affected by variations in climate, including precipitation and temperature, which is recorded in recorded in the width and composition of tree rings in many species, particularly Atlantic white cedar. Bramante…

A new study led by WHOI scientist Jeff Donnelly found that intense hurricanes frequently pounded Cape Cod during the first millennium. Donnelly (in orange shirt), accompanied by Stephanie Madsen (left), Richard Sullivan (center), and Brecia Douglas (right) collected sediment cores from Salt Pond in Falmouth, Mass. Analysis of the cores showed evidence of 23 severe hurricanes that hit New England…

The storm surge from the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, which made landfall as a category 3 storm on Long Island battered the shore of Woods Hole, Mass. In addition to destroying infrastructure and threatening lives, large waves from hurricanes can erode shorelines and transport coastal sediment into nearby ponds and marshes, preserving a record of the…