The Portage Bay location provides for easy staging of cruises on the two research vessels operated by the School. Graduate students are involved in all of the cruises, most often for their thesis research. A unique opportunity is provided by the School's support of forty-five days of ship time for instructional uses. Specialized laboratory instruments such as ratio and quadrupole mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes, and seawater sediment transport flumes are routinely used in graduate thesis research. Computing plays a key role in graduate research with uses ranging from computation intensive activities like numerical modeling, time series analysis, geophysical data inversion, and image processing, to instrument control and data acquisition in both the field and laboratory, to routine tasks such as word processing and communication.
Personal computers are ubiquitous.
Nearly all of these systems are linked to the UW Ethernet. The College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences has its own national caliber library with 60,000 volumes and subscriptions to over 1,300 primary and review journals. The UW Libraries Catalog, a bibliographic search system devoted to the oceanographic sciences, and a myriad other information resources are accessible on PC's from home or office. The School of Oceanography offers courses each year at the University's Friday Harbor Laboratories on San Juan Island at the northern end of Puget Sound. Due to polar emergence and the constant cold water of Puget Sound there are unique opportunities for the study of benthic processes more commonly observed only at bathyal depths.