Oceanography

Researchers monitoring daily satellite images of Greenland's glaciers have discovered break-ups at two of the largest glaciers in the last month. They expect that part of the Northern hemisphere's longest floating glacier will continue to disintegrate within the next year. A massive 11-square-mile (29-square-kilometer) piece of the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland broke away between July 10th and by July 24th. The loss to that glacier is equal to half the size of Manhattan Island. The last major ice loss to Petermann occurred when the glacier lost 33 square miles (86 square kilometers…

A revised outlook for the Arctic 2008 summer sea ice minimum shows ice extent will be below the 2005 level but not likely to beat the 2007 record, say researchers with DAMOCLES (Developing Arctic Modeling and Observing Capabilities for Long-term Environmental Studies), an integrated ice-atmosphere-ocean monitoring and forecasting system designed for observing, understanding and quantifying climate changes in the Arctic. DAMOCLES will dispatch eleven research missions into the Arctic this autumn to better understand the future of the sea ice. Chances that the 2008 ice extent will fall below…

Global climate change could explain the explosion in marine biodiversity that took place 460 million years ago, according to researchers from INSU-CNRS Laboratoire PaléoEnvironnements et PaléobioSphère (CNRS)Université Claude Bernard Lyon and Australian National University in Canberra. They have found evidence of a progressive ocean cooling of about 15°C over a period of 40 million years during the Ordovician, a geologic period extending from 490 to 440 million years ago. Until now, this geologic period had been associated with a "super greenhouse effect" on our planet. The results from…

Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms—expressed in terms of carbon mass—living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online by Nature. This tonnage corresponds to about one-tenth of the amount of carbon stored globally in tropical rainforests. The authors: Kai-Uwe Hinrichs and Julius Lipp of the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) at University of Bremen, Germany; and Fumio Inagaki and Yuki Morono of the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) concluded that…

University of Alberta scientists contend they have the answer to mass extinction of animals and plants 93 million years ago. The answer, research has uncovered, has been found at the bottom of the sea floor where lava fountains erupted, altering the chemistry of the sea and possibly of the atmosphere. Earth and Atmospheric Science researchers Steven Turgeon and Robert Creaser found specific isotope levels of the element osmium, an indicator of volcanism in seawater, in black shale—rocks containing high amounts of organic matter—drilled off the coast of South America and in the mountains of…

Scientists announced today the discovery of reef structures they believe doubles the size of the Southern Atlantic Ocean's largest and richest reef system, the Abrolhos Bank, off the southern coast of Brazil's Bahia state. The newly discovered area is also far more abundant in marine life than the previously known Abrolhos reef system, one of the world's most unique and important reefs. Researchers from Conservation International (CI), Federal University of Espírito Santo and Federal University of Bahia announced their discovery in a paper presented today at the International Coral Reef…

Human emissions of carbon dioxide are loading the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases and have also begun to alter the chemistry of the ocean, according to a team of chemical researchers. The ecological and economic consequences are difficult to predict but possibly calamitous, they say in the July 4 issue of Science, and halting the changes already underway will likely require even steeper cuts in carbon emissions than those currently proposed to curb climate change. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, writing with lead author Richard Zeebe of…

Predicting climate change depends on many factors not properly included in current forecasting models, such as how the major polar ice caps will move in the event of melting around their edges. This in turn requires greater understanding of the processes at work when ice is under stress, influencing how it flows and moves. The immediate objective is to model the flow of ice sheets and glaciers more accurately, leading in turn to better future predictions of global ice cover for use in climate modeling and forecasting. Progress and future research objectives in the field were discussed at a…

The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report was wrong, say a group of researchers, but not about whether there was global warming. Rather, the report underestimated its effects concerning ocean temperature and associated sea level increases between 1961 and 2003 - by 50 percent. The report in the June 19 edition of Nature compared climate models with observations that show sea levels rose by 1.5 millimeters per year in the period from 1961-2003. That equates to an approximately 2 inch increase in ocean levels in a 42-year span. Not exactly WaterWorld but not insignificant…

Activities such as aquaculture, shipping and recreational boating have led to an army of marine alien species hitchhiking around the globe. And only you can stop them. Queen's University Belfast is attempting to find out exactly where and how non-native species get a foothold in a new area. To do this it is asking for help from the public to record what they have seen. Part of the Marine Aliens consortium, co-ordinated by the Scottish Association for Marine Science, the project will use the information gathered to look at how invasions can be slowed or preferably prevented. It is very…