El Niño—Spanish for the child—is the name climate scientists have given the occasional periods of Pacific Ocean warming that play havoc with global weather patterns. For example, El Niño is known to intensify winter storms for residents of the West Coast, Gulf states, and southeast United States. El Niño also dampens Atlantic hurricane formation and can increase the number of Pacific hurricanes.
Archive for the ‘Oceanography’ Category
The Russian military allegedly dumped nuclear waste into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s, according to a report on Swedish television.
Radioactive material from a military base in Latvia is thought to have been thrown into Swedish waters.
Extraordinary footage of a rarely seen giant deep sea fish has been captured by scientists.
Using a remotely operated vehicle, they caught a rare glimpse of the huge oarfish, perhaps the first sighting of the fish in its natural setting.
A microbe commonly found in the Chesapeake Bay and other waterways emits a poison not just to protect itself but to stun and immobilize the prey it plans to eat, a team of researchers from four universities has discovered. The findings about algae linked to massive fish kills could lead to new ways to slow the growth of these tiny but toxic marine creatures.
It is pitch black, icy cold and the pressure is phenomenal. The deepest parts of the ocean are some of the least hospitable places on Earth – yet footage from recent expeditions reveals that life in the oceanic trenches is thriving.
The third-largest remaining piece of the slowly disintegrating B17-B iceberg, which broke off Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf a decade ago, resembles a cartoon drawing of a whale in this natural-color image from the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite.
Scientists have uncovered what appears to be a further dramatic increase in the leakage of methane gas that is seeping from the Arctic seabed.
High-resolution computer simulations by scientists at NOCS helps understanding of the inflow of North Atlantic water to the Arctic Ocean and how this influences ocean climate.
An additional 2 degrees of global warming could commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise.
Alaska’s marine animals have an unexpected nutrient in their diets: ancient carbon from glacier melt, a new study says.
An expansive bloom of phytoplankton (single-celled, plant-like organisms) traced colorful swirls across the South Pacific Ocean between New Zealand (left) and the Chatham Islands (right) on December 23, 2009.
Brendan Foley hunts for shipwrecks, but he’s not searching for gold or jewels. The sunken treasure he pursues comes not in chests, but mostly in curvaceous clay jars called amphorae—the cargo containers of the B.C. world. Holding remnants of goods and foodstuffs produced and traded by ancient civilizations,
The world’s oceans, which normally gobble up carbon dioxide, are getting stuffed to the gills, according to the most thorough study to date of human-made carbon in the seas.
An ancient dwarf whale unearthed in southeastern Australia captured its prey by slurping up mouthfuls of mud, a new study says.
On Sept. 19, 2009, a heavy lift crane lifted NOAA’s newest coastal mapping vessel, Ferdinand R. Hassler, off its construction site and into the air at VT Halter Marine shipyard in Moss Point, Miss.
On December 10, 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that El Niño conditions spotted earlier in 2009 had strengthened.
The White House’s budget office has added $87 million to the $428.8 million the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) planned to request for the troubled National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) for 2011.
The annual rate of increase in carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels has more than tripled in this decade, compared to the 1990s, reports an international consortium of scientists, who paint a bleak picture of the Earth’s future unless “CO2 emissions [are] drastically reduced.”
In a striking finding that raises new questions about carbon dioxide’s (CO2) impact on marine life, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists report that some shell-building creatures—such as crabs, shrimp and lobsters—unexpectedly build more shell when exposed to ocean acidification caused by elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2).
Can minerals be extracted from the seafloor without environmental impacts?
The ocean’s known sulfide deposits may be only a fraction of what’s actually there. “There’s a lot of real estate out there where no data have been collected,” said WHOI geochemist Chris German.