Key West Harbor News

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the largest independent institution of its kind in the world, recently began developing a new piston corer for retrieving sediments from the ocean floor. Once complete in 2006, the deep-water coring system will be the largest in the U.S. and among the biggest in the world. The corer’s enormous weight — 25,000 pounds — coupled with the environmental demands associated with working in water up to 20,000 ft. deep presented major technical challenges to the system required to lower the corer to the sea floor then recover it, along with its ancient sediment samples. Located in Cape Cod, Mass.…

The final steps in a U.S. Navy dredging project of Key West Harbor were completed Aug. 8 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The original dredge project, completed in 2005, restored the Key West Harbor to a uniform depth of 36 feet, giving U.S. Navy ships and commercial vessels a clear, six-mile, 300-foot wide channel to enter the port. However, the hurricanes that passed near Key West in 2005 caused sand and silt to fill in some of the dredged depth, causing shoaling in the channel. The final touch to the project began in March with a maintenance dredge of the harbor, to regain the designed depth that was lost due to the shoaling. Sponsored and funded by the U.S. Navy, the project was engineered by the U.S.