1 August 2016 (Science Blog) – On Monday, sport divers on the M/V Fling, diving in the Gulf of Mexico 100 miles offshore of Texas and Louisiana, were stunned to find green, hazy water, huge patches of ugly white mats coating corals and sponges, and dead animals littering the bottom on the East Flower Garden […]
27 July 2016 (NASA) – On 24 July 2016, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite acquired a natural-color image (top) of a phytoplankton bloom in Hood Canal—a fjord in Washington’s Puget Sound. The second image shows a more detailed view of the bloom on July 27 as observed by the Operational […]
6 July 2016 (Society for Experimental Biology) – Scientists from the University of Washington have found evidence that ocean acidification caused by carbon emissions can prevent mussels attaching themselves to rocks and other substrates, making them easy targets for predators and threatening the mussel farming industry. “A strong attachment is literally a mussel’s lifeline,” said […]
By Julie Makinen13 July 2016 (Los Angeles Times) – China struck back loudly and forcefully Wednesday after an international tribunal invalidated many of its claims in the South China Sea. But Beijing has largely been silent about some of the tribunal’s most damning findings: that its activities there have “caused devastating and long-lasting damage to […]
By Jane Qiu 20 June 2016 (Nature) – Toxic chemicals are accumulating in marine creatures in Earth’s deepest oceanic trenches, the first measurements of organic pollutants in these regions have revealed. “We often think deep-sea trenches are remote and pristine, untouched by humans,” says Alan Jamieson, a deep-ocean researcher at the University of Aberdeen, UK. […]
By Matt Wood17 June 2016 (University of Chicago) – California mussel shells collected off the coast of Washington state in the 1970s are, on average, 32 percent thicker than modern specimens, according to a new study published by UChicago biologists. Shells collected by Native Americans 1,000 to 1,300 years ago were also 27 percent thicker […]
4 May 2016 (ABC News) – Piles of dead whales, salmon, sardines, and clams blamed on the El Niño freak weather phenomenon have been clogging Chile’s pacific beaches in recent months. Last year, scientists were shocked when more than 300 whales turned up dead on remote bays of the southern coast — it was the […]
[cf. Graph of the Day: Simulated catastrophic decline of plankton in warming oceans] By Chris Mooney28 April 2016 (Washington Post) – In the long list of troubling climate change scenarios, there’s one that gets relatively little attention, but definitely has enormous potential consequences. It goes like this: The oceans are getting warmer — they are, […]
18 April 2016 (Stockholm University) – When organic material released from thawing permafrost is transported to the sea it gets broken down in the seawater contributing to a more rapid acidification of the Arctic Ocean, finds new research by scientists from Stockholm University and colleagues. Ocean acidification is an important consequence of humankind’s release of […]
By Charlotte Eve Davies28 March 2016 (The Conversation) – Global climate change is altering the world’s oceans in many ways. Some impacts have received wide coverage, such as shrinking Arctic sea ice, rising sea levels, and ocean warming. However, as the oceans warm, marine scientists are observing other forms of damage. My research focuses […]
