SoMAS: SCHOOL OF MARINE AND ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES
The SoMAS Southampton Marine Station is located on Old Fort Pond in Shinnecock Bay, a short walk from the main campus. From the facility, students and faculty have direct access to local bays, estuaries, and the Atlantic Ocean. The marine station is the site of five laboratories and a fleet of boats including the R/V Paumanok, a 44-foot ocean-going vessel used for coastal research, the R/V Shinnecock, a 35-foot platform craft used for sampling local bays and estuaries and the R/V Peconic, a 45-foot catamaran, houseboat-style vessel for operation in protected bays and rivers. Smaller outboard craft are equipped with winches, davits and metering wheels for sampling instruments such as oxygen analyzers, CTD-probes, and trawls. The aquarium/wet laboratory allows maintenance of live marine species throughout the year for classroom use.
Stony Brook University’s new Marine Sciences Center will be the hub of educational, research, and outreach activities for the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences (SoMAS) at the Stony Brook Southampton campus. The 15,000-square foot building will facilitate the growth of research programs related to Long Island’s bays and estuaries and will enable SoMAS to expand its academic offering to students at Stony Brook and around the world who enroll in their new ‘Semester by the Sea’ program. The facility features a computerized, state-of the-art 2,500-square-foot indoor seawater lab, which can recreate and maintain the seawater of any marine ecosystem on the planet. It will also serve as a hub for public meetings, summer camps, diving and sailing programs and allow for expanded K-12 outreach programs.
“Our faculty and graduate students are engaged in cutting edge research both locally and globally, ranging from organic and inorganic compounds in planktonic systems to global climate change, from laboratory and field studies of atmospheric and marine particles to environmental modeling using massively parallel computers, from marine conservation to weather forecasting, and much more.” — Minghua Zhang, Dean, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences. Director, Marine Sciences Research Center.
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Copy courtesy of SoMAS.