From NASA By Esprit Smith, NASA’s Earth Science News Team A tagged elephant seal basks on Kerguelen Island, a French territory in the Antarctic. Elephant seals are tagged as part of a French research program called SO-MEMO (Observing System – Mammals as Samplers of the Ocean Environment), operated by the French National Center for Scientific…
From NASA Global Climate Change Researchers used the space-based CALIPSO lidar to measure the planet’s largest animal migration, which takes place when small sea creatures swim up from the depths at night to feed on phytoplankton, then back down again just before sunrise. Credit: NASA/Timothy Marvel Every night, under the cover of darkness, countless small…
oceans University of Exeter Sharks, penguins, turtles and other seagoing species could help humans monitor the oceans by transmitting oceanographic information from electronic tags. Thousands of marine animals are tagged for a variety of research and conservation purposes, but at present the information gathered isn’t widely used to track climate change and other shifts in…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Those who know me are aware that I’m a tropical boy, a hopeless addict of warm blue seas and coconut-laden islands with white sand beaches. Here’s where I used to live and work, Liapari Island in the Solomon Islands. That is how I like my water to behave, soft, warm,…
News Release 26-Jun-2019 Is a great iron fertilization experiment already underway? University of South Florida (USF Innovation) ST. PETERSBURG, FL – It’s no secret that massive dust storms in the Saharan Desert occasionally shroud the North Atlantic Ocean with iron, but it turns out these natural blankets aren’t the only things to sneeze at. Iron…
More “settled science” of the carbon cycle~ctm Stanford study shows how hydrothermal vents fuel massive phytoplankton blooms — and possible hotspots for carbon storage Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences Researchers at Stanford University say they have found an aquatic highway that lets nutrients from Earth’s belly sweep up to surface waters off…
ETH Zurich IMAGE: Phytoplankton boasts an amazing variety of forms and species. Credit: Meike Vogt und Jorge Martinez-Rey / ETH Zurich With some 10,000 to 20,000 different species in the world’s oceans, the diversity of phytoplankton (phyto from the Greek for plant) species is extremely rich. These phytoplankton form a key element of ocean ecosystems…
Kevin Kilty May 10, 2019 From Physics Today (April 2019 Issue, p. 19)1: The overturning of water in the North Atlantic depends on meridional overturning circulation (MOC) wherein warm surface waters in the tropical Atlantic move to higher latitudes losing heat and moisture to the atmosphere along the way. In the North Atlantic and Arctic…
Climate-driven changes in phytoplankton communities will intensify the blue and green regions of the world’s oceans From the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Climate change is causing significant changes to phytoplankton in the world’s oceans, and a new MIT study finds that over the coming decades these changes will affect the ocean’s color, intensifying its blue…
Curtin researchers believe that ancient supercontinents formed and then fell apart through alternating cycles spanning hundreds of millions of years that involved superoceans being swallowed and the restructuring of the Earth’s mantle. The research, published in science journal Precambrian Research, found the supercontinents assembled and broke up through alternating processes of ‘introversion’ and ‘extroversion’. The latter process…