Oceanography
The change in global sea level rise since the beginning of the 20th century has been significantly larger than previous estimates according to new estimates in a new paper.
The paper, co-authored by Carling Hay, a Harvard post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS), and Eric Morrow, a recent PhD graduate, says that previous estimates of global sea-level rise from 1900-1990 had been over-estimated by as much as 30 percent.
But it confirms previous estimates of sea-level change since 1990, and that suggests that the rate of sea-level change is increasing…
The massive ice sheet that covers about 80 percent of Greenland is the largest single chunk of melting snow and ice in the world
and for that reason it is considered the biggest potential contributor to rising sea levels due to glacial meltwater in a warming world.
What gets the most media, and therefore a lot of research, attention is the ice sheet's aquamarine lakes -- bodies of meltwater that tend to abruptly drain -- and monster chunks of ice that slide into the ocean to become icebergs.
But a new study reveals a vast network of little-understood rivers and streams flowing on top of the…
Ocean Currents in the South Asian Archipelago
The losses of AirAsia QX8501 and Malaysia Airlines MH370 are tragic. I hope that the relatives may find some comfort in the knowledge that their loved ones will have a lasting monument in improvements in air safety and in improved knowledge of our planet's oceans and climate.
As a direct result of the loss of MH370 a large scale ocean-floor survey was commenced, leading to almost daily discoveries of scientific importance.
MH370 Operational Search Update—07 January 2015
Fugro Equator completed bathymetric survey work in the search…
The ice on Greenland formed due to processes in the deep Earth interior of the Arctic, large-scale glaciations that began about 2.7 million years ago. Prior to that, the northern hemisphere was so warm it was mostly without it, and that period lasted for 500 million years.
The big question geologically is why the glaciation of Greenland only developed so recently.
It's because of the interaction of three tectonic processes. Greenland literally had to be lifted up, so that the mountain peaks reached into sufficiently cold altitudes of the atmosphere. Greenland also needed to move…
Over the past decade, ocean acidification has started to receive recognition outside science, though primarily as another weapon in the 'carbon dioxide' culture war on the modern world, similar to methane being discussed this year.
Politics aside, it is a vital area for study and a new article outlines three major challenges to understanding the real issues and effects: It needs to expand from single to multiple drivers, from single species to communities and ecosystems, and from evaluating acclimation to understanding adaptation.
For the scientific community, it is obvious…
Oceanlab Scientists Film Supergiant Amphipod and Deepest Fish
Scientists at the University of Aberdeen have set a new record for
the world's deepest fish, a species of snailfish, which was filmed in the Mariana Trench this year.
The new finding was just one of several new species discovered, as
well as the first footage of a living supergiant amphipod.
[The team] managed to amass the greatest volume of video ever taken at these
depths, 105 hours in total. Aside from the new deepest fish record and
supergiant observations, they filmed many other species of fish, setting
new depth records…
Predictions about specific effects of climate change were once common - but they turned out to be spectacularly wrong so there are fewer these days. In 2006, former Vice-President Al Gore said by 2016 it would be too late to do anything, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said African farmers would be suffering 50% yield drops by 2020 and the Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035.
Today, the IPCC is more scientific and cautions against attributing specific weather events to global warming. They recognize that the public loses confidence in science itself when…
Though some see snowstorms and believe global warming has been exaggerated, a new study using predictions of Greenland ice loss and its impact on rising sea levels instead finds that other models may be greatly underestimating it.
The new estimate simulates future distribution of lakes that form on the ice sheet surface from melted snow and ice, called supraglacial lakes. Previously, the impact of supraglacial lakes on Greenland ice loss had been assumed to be small, but the new research has shown that they will migrate farther inland over the next half century, potentially altering…
Hank |
In 1992, some shipping containers got washed overboard on a trip from Hong Kong to Tacoma. Among the losses was one containing 28,800 plastic bath toys known as Friendly Floatees - frogs, turtles, ducks, that kind of thing. It's not an uncommon event, storms cause, on average, about one container per day to get lost at sea, a minor amount when we consider how much shipping is done annually.
Most of them sink to the ocean floor but the floating critters container ruptured and in the years since then, ducks, frogs and turtles have gone to England and other parts of the Atlantic, and even…
A new estimate says that microplastic and macroplastic pollution could consist of as much as 269,000 tons floating in the world's oceans.
Though there has been no sufficient data to truly estimate the amount of plastic in the oceans, there has been no limit to guessing and speculation so Marcus Eriksen, from Five Gyres Institute, and colleagues set out to build a better model.
For their paper in PLOS ONE, they gathered data from 24 expeditions collected over a six-year period (2007-2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, coastal Australia, Bay of Bengal, and the Mediterranean…