Retiring the R/V Endeavor: Celebrating a Lifetime of Accomplishments and Memories
to have over 730 successful science missions. It's a real testament to the crew, technicians and scientists on board because 50 years of success is almost unheard of. It's the longest running oceanographic vessel in the fleet," Thornton said. "It's a testament to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the ship's operators for being able to successfully run a vessel that long. There was a lot of care, a lot of thought, a lot of planning and good people that went into making sure she had successful operation for this number of years.Gruebel also feels that Endeavor's
Monitoring the Restless Earth for the Next “Big One”
Zone. It was here that the Chignik earthquake struck – and USGS was ready for a post-earthquake response mission.Just a couple of years before, three GNSS-A monitoring sites had been set up on the seafloor off Alaska, in the Aleutian subduction zone, by a team of scientists funded by US National Science Foundation (NSF).Several Wave Glider surveys had been carried by the USGS and Scripps prior to the M8.2 Chignik earthquake, monitoring the position of the sites in about 1,200 m water depth.Within weeks of the earthquake, USGS had their Wave Glider back out to measure what movement there had been
Scientists Discover Six Million Year Old Ice in Antarctica, Offers Unprecedented Window into a Warmer Earth
;s past climate, where abundant geological evidence indicates much warmer temperatures and higher sea levels compared to today.The research was led by Sarah Shackleton, assistant scientist in Geology & Geophysics, and John Higgins of Princeton University, who are affiliated with the National Science Foundation-funded Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, or COLDEX, a collaboration of 15 U.S. research institutions led by Oregon State University.“Ice cores are like time machines that let scientists take a look at what our planet was like in the past,” said Shackleton, who has participated
Sonardyne Technology Selected for New Oceanographic Research Vessels
Underwater positioning and tracking technology from Sonardyne has been chosen for three new oceanographic research vessels being built under the US' National Science Foundation (NSF) Regional Class Research Vessel (RCRV) construction program.Led by Oregon State University, the RCRVs are being built for the US' Academic Research Fleet (ARF), enabling a new era of coastal and regional marine science. To support the RCRV's scientific missions, across diverse marine environments, Oregon State University selected Sonardyne's Ranger 2 Gyro USBL 7000, engineered to meet both the demanding
Marine Heatwaves Impact Food Webs
affected those microscopic organisms to see if those impacts were connected to the amount of carbon being produced and exported to the deep ocean.”The research team used information collected by the Global Ocean Biogeochemical (GO-BGC) Array, a collaborative initiative funded by the US National Science Foundation and led by MBARI that uses robotic floats to monitor ocean health.The GO-BGC project has deployed hundreds of autonomous biogeochemical Argo (BGC-Argo) floats, which measure ocean conditions such as temperature, salinity, nitrate, oxygen, chlorophyll, and particulate organic carbon (POC)
Seismometers Retrieved for Slow-Slip Earthquake Study
Earth Observatory, and the University of Rhode Island are the research partners on this project. Scientific research funding for this project has come from New Zealand's Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment, Germany’s Helmholtz Association, the United States National Science Foundation, and Japanese government science funding
Whale Fecal Samples Link Ocean Warming to Rising Algal Toxins in Arctic Waters
19 years. While domoic acid was less prevalent (in some years no DA was detected), this study shows for the first time that domoic acid exposures in Arctic waters are increasing due to warming and loss of sea ice.Scientists used data from a monitoring mooring in the Beaufort Sea, funded by the National Science foundation’s Arctic Observing Network, to compare toxins in the bowhead whales to environmental conditions. “It was fortuitous that we’ve maintained a long-term mooring near the whale feeding site, which provided the opportunity to investigate the role of the changing circulation
Satellite data from Ship Captures Landslide-Generated Tsunami
place at the right time to show this method also works for landslide-generated tsunamis.”On May 8, 2022, a landslide near the port city of Seward, Alaska, sent debris tumbling into Resurrection Bay, creating a series of small tsunami waves. The R/V Sikuliaq, a research ship owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, was moored 650 meters (0.4 miles) away. It was equipped with an external Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver previously installed by Ethan Roth, the ship’s science operations manager and co-author of the study.Adam
Research Vessels: A Conversation with Bruce Applegate of UNOLS
the United States among other countries.Copyright 2025 Scripps Institution of Oceanography / UC San DiegoFunding and the Future of UNOLSOceanographic research holds significant value yet continues to struggle with ongoing funding difficulties. UNOLS depends mainly on financial backing from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) yet existing funding fails to satisfy expanding research needs. “If we doubled our budget tomorrow, we would still have enough scientific projects ready to use that additional capacity immediately,” Applegate emphasized.UNOLS
February 2026
