Colin Ware's work with the Smithsonian, of the oceans depicted as a global system, pictured in the New York Times.

...The groups involved in the FISHPAC project included NMFS, OCS, NOAA's Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, the U.S. Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) and the University of New Hampshire's (UNH) Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM), as well as several private contractors and suppliers of undersea technology.

The researchers are aboard a U.S. Coast Guard ice cutter for the fourth U.S. expedition "designed to map the uncharted parts of the Arctic sea for establishing an extended continental shelf," said Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping at the University of New Hampshire and head of the research team.

The first cruise is led by the University of New Hampshire’s Joint Hydrographic Center, with support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Maine Maritime Academy welcomed a team of oceanographic researchers to campus this week as part of an educational cooperative with the University of New Hampshire (UNH), Durham, N.H. The research team consists of faculty and students from the University’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM), and members of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Joint Hydrographic Center (JHC) based at the University. The CCOM-JHC conducts a variety of seafloor mapping research projects in partnership with NOAA. This year, the group is conducting a bathymetric survey of the Bagaduce River and Castine Harbor. The study is scheduled to take place through Saturday, June 21.

This summer, American scientists will be charting the sea floor north of Alaska on a Coast Guard icebreaker. Chief scientist Larry Mayer says that he’ll always remember two sights from last year’s voyage, when the ice had shrunk so much that the ship was able to research at least 100 miles farther north than was previously possible. He was excited by the first sight: the sea bottom captured on his computer screen. The floor was pocked with 300-foot-wide holes, an occurrence that usually indicates escaping natural gas. The second sight occurred when Mayer was standing on deck. He spotted a lone polar bear drifting on a 30-foot-wide piece of ice. In the old days, the animal could have walked on solid ice back to land, but now it was bent and doomed. To Mayer, the two sights highlighted opportunity and tragedy in the least-mapped area of the world.

A new study says whale-watching boats are going too fast near whales, endangering them and disregarding a decade-old pledge to slow down.

Last summer, researchers from NOAA and the Joint Hydrographic Center at the University of New Hampshire in Durham spent a month surveying 10,000 kilometers of the Chukchi Cap ridge in the Arctic to create the most detailed, high-resolution maps of the area to date. The expedition’s seafloor data and maps are now available online at www.ccom.unh.edu.