Teacher Is Credited With Arctic Discovery
Carmel Middle School (Carmel, Ind.) teacher Christine Hedge, NOAA’s Teacher at Sea aboard the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy, recently discovered a new seamount (underwater mountain) in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of North America. [more]

NOAA Vents Program: 25 Years of Earthshaking Discoveries
This year, the Vents program at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory is celebrating its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter century of research, discoveries and technological innovations in the volatile depths of some of the world’s best-known oceans.  [more]

Catching the Rays: New Solar Calculator a Big Hit With Public
The redesigned NOAA Solar Calculator, a Web site that lets users calculate the sun’s precise position, has captured the interest of thousands of Web surfers since its launch in early July. Users can use a simple Google map interface to calculate the sun’s angles at any location in the world at any given time — including the times of sunrise and sunset. Simply point to a location on the planet, enter time and date, and voila! [more]

Group Effort Recovers Valuable NOAA Prototype
It didn’t take a village, but it did take a family — the NOAA family and a few others — to recover a unique and valuable scientific instrument, known as the Mariner Shuttle, from the bottom of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay on Aug., 12. [more]

nowCOAST Honored with GIS Award
NOAA’s “nowCOAST,” a map-based online gateway to ocean and weather observations and forecasts, received a Special Achievement in GIS “for its vision, leadership and innovative use of ESRI's geographic information system (GIS) technology” last month at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego. [more]

10 Years Later: A Look Back at the Historic Search for JFK Jr.’s Plane
It’s hard to believe that it was 10 years ago this July that a small plane piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in an accident that drew world-wide attention and a media frenzy. For Office of Coast Survey scientists, professionals, and NOAA Corps officers who were on the scene of the crash or involved with search and recovery efforts, it was a day they’d never forget. [more]

Mid-Atlantic Ridge Survey Finds Potential New Species
An international scientific team headed by NOAA’s Mike Vecchione of the Northeast Fisheries Science Center recently surveyed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, halfway between Iceland and the Azores, and may have found new life forms, as well as more clues to understanding deep-sea food webs. [more]