Oceanography

The Norwegian Sea Has...Fresh Water...and The Atlantic Ocean Has Even More

The salty ocean is the last place you'd expect to find fresh water but a remote-controlled vehicle deployed from the research vessel G.O. Sars found, collected and measured just that during a Norwegian Sea expedition in 2017.  The Norwegian Sea is nea ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 28 2019 - 12:54pm

420 Million Years Ago, Oxygen Depletion Caused A Mass Extinction That Out Wiped 23 Percent Of All Marine Animals

Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet. For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 30 2019 - 4:35pm

Parasitic Worms In Sushi: A Dramatic 283X Increase Since The 1970s

A new review finds a dramatic increase in the abundance of a worm that can be transmitted to humans who sushi- 283-fold more since the 1970s But is that due to better detection or a real increase? And what implications does it have for humans and marine ma ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 19 2020 - 8:50am

Seals Happy About Global Warming Sea Ice Loss

Though the developed world is concerned about greenhouse gas emissions implicated in climate change and global warming, reactions in nature have been less consistent. Polar bears have been increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, where they eat b ...

Article - Cash Simpson - Apr 1 2020 - 12:48pm

E. Thermophilum: Deep Sea Natural Gas Munching Microbes Can Eat CO2 Also

Though we convert fat, protein, and carbohydrates to make our common ATP energy currency, microbes have a far more diverse diet. It turns out a new one can even digest organic compounds like ethane, the second most common component of natural gas. In the s ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 21 2020 - 11:49am

Plant Respiration Implicated In Arctic Melting

A new paper has implicated a physiologic mechanism in vegetation as a cause for Arctic warming. The "greenhouse effect" is well-known by now, water vapor that plants emit during photosynthesis serves to lower land surface temperature, similar wa ...

Article - News Staff - May 14 2020 - 10:30am

Green Snow: In A Warmer World, Algae Could Spread Across The Antarctic

Satellite data with on-the-ground observations over two summers in Antarctica to detect and measure the green snow algae have led a group of scientists to suggest that if the world warms, larger fields of bright green snow could be seen from space as it sp ...

Article - News Staff - May 20 2020 - 10:33am

Is The Red Sea Actually An Ocean?

The Red Sea is about 1000 miles long and at most just over 170 miles wide. The Greeks called it a sea but they also called the Persian Gulf a sea. It may instead be an ocean, because an ocean basin exists between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. The Greek ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 27 2021 - 11:50am

If Higher Tides Really Threaten Bay Area Roads, Stop Dumping Fresh Water Into The Bay During A Drought

San Francisco is worried that highway 37 may be in danger of flooding. They invoke environmental justice, of course, but it's really about rich people going to their second homes in Napa's wine country on weekends. Rich people need peasants toili ...

Article - Hank Campbell - Jul 19 2021 - 2:07pm

Coral Reefs Recover Quickly After Bleaching Due To Water Temperature Changes

Water has varied in temperature for as long as water has existed and it seems evolution has provided coral reefs a recovery mechanism after variation results in 'bleaching'- when corals expel algae and turn white. It can have some impact beyond a ...

Article - News Staff - Apr 11 2022 - 11:43am