Since its beginning in 1903 as a field station for students and scientists at Harvard University and New York University, BIOS has hosted hundreds of students from colleges and universities around the world. Over the years, students conducting research at BIOS have used their experiences as springboards for acceptance into graduate degree programs, a variety of technical and research positions (both at BIOS and abroad), and—frequently—a scientific publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Chemical oceanographer Nick Bates’s ongoing study of the ocean-atmosphere interface sheds light on a group of tiny, beautiful marine plants called coccolithophores, which have been found to release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in regions near Antarctica.

For five weeks spanning October and early November, Brett Jameson, a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, is working with BIOS biogeochemical oceanographer Damian Grundle on a project investigating the microbial production of nitrous oxide (N2O) in low oxygen marine environments.

Earlier this year, BIOS senior scientist and coral reef ecologist Eric Hochberg published a paper in the journal Coral Reefs that put numbers to a widely accepted concept in reef science: that materials in seawater (such as phytoplankton, organic matter, or suspended sediment) can affect how much light, as well as the wavelength of light, reaches the seafloor. This, in turn, impacts the ecology of organisms, including corals and algae, that live on the seafloor and rely on that light for photosynthesis.

As part of the natural carbon cycle, atmospheric CO2 reacts with the ocean’s surface waters to become carbonate, which can be converted by marine organisms into calcium carbonate. Many marine organisms—including corals, mussels, and algae—rely on calcium carbonate to build their shells or skeletons, making the molecule an important part of marine processes.

When you consider ways to study the process of aging in humans, you might not consider looking to one of the ocean’s most widely-studied invertebrates—the sea urchin—but that’s exactly what BIOS researchers Dr. Jeannette Loram and Dr. Andrea Bodnar did in a recent study published in the journal Mechanisms of Ageing and Development.

The June 2012 issue of Eos featured the first report of the newly formed Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) Working Group (WG) 139. The group, chaired by BIOS scientist Dr. Kristen Buck, represents a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of trace metal biogeochemists, organic geochemists, and biogeochemical modelers.

Earlier this year, BIOS associate scientist and zooplankton ecologist Leocadio Blanco-Bercial published a paper in the scientific journal Frontiers in Marine Science that sheds light on zooplankton communities in the Sargasso Sea, where zooplankton diversity is among the highest in the world’s ocean.

Every hurricane season, from June 1 through November 30, we’re reminded that hurricanes are a force to be reckoned with, particularly when they make landfall in densely populated areas like Bermuda. In the wake of such a storm, local governments, businesses, homeowners and—of course—insurance companies are left trying to assess the damage and assign a final price tag to recovery and rebuilding efforts. Rick Murnane, Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI) Project Manager and Senior Research Scientist at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), recently published a study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that may serve as an important tool in streamlining these efforts.

For many years scientists have operated on the belief—backed by extensive calculations and climate models—that the global ocean absorbs approximately 30% of the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by human activities. However, in a recent paper published in the journal Biogeosciences, Dr. Nicholas Bates, Senior Scientist and Associate Director of Research at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), discovered this might not always be true.