From the NYTimes Sunday Magazine story on the role of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in recovery of the Air France plane that

two year ago crashed into the deep ocean waters. More on WHOI and Remus 6000, an underwater recovery robot, here.

(While your at it, check out WHOI’s new site on its role in the Gulf oil spill research.)

In the weeks after Flight 447 went down, as the French and Brazilian navies trolled the ocean near Tasil Point, they found more than 3,000 pieces of debris scattered across the surface, including fragments of the wings, most of the tail fin and the seats of cabin crew. They also found the bodies of 50 passengers, some still clothed and some still wearing jewelry. But as they transported the bodies to a morgue in Brazil and assembled the wreckage at a warehouse in Toulouse, the glimmering surface of the ocean remained as impenetrable as a shield of diamonds. When French investigators began calling oceanographers and deep-sea adventurers in a desperate effort to reach the bottom, the name of one organization kept coming up.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a sprawling complex of shingled houses, brick laboratories and cavernous warehouses spread across two campuses in southern Cape Cod. In the 1970s, Woods Hole scientists discovered hydrothermal vents brimming with life at the bottom of the Pacific. In the 1980s, they discovered the Titanic under more than 12,000 feet of water. In the 1990s, their submarine laboratory pushed boundaries in underwater technology, building the first Remus in ’95, then adding cameras and new sensors and smarter computers, culminating in the Remus 6000. No other organization had more experience with the Remus than the scientists like Purcell who built it; and the director of special projects at Woods Hole, David Gallo, is an expert in the underwater mountains. In fact, he wrote his dissertation on the midocean ridge. When I asked Michel Guerard, a vice president at Airbus, how Woods Hole was selected to lead the search, he shrugged and said, “Because no one else in the world can do it.”