Oceanography
Researchers from the University of Hawai'i (UH) and NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries today announced the discovery of an intact "ghost ship" in 2,000 feet of water nearly 20 miles off the coast of Oahu - the former cable ship Dickenson, later the USS Kailua.
Launched in Chester, Pennsylvania in early 1923 for the Commercial Pacific Cable Company, Dickenson was part of a global network of submarine cable that carried telecommunications around the world. Repairing cable and carrying supplies, Dickenson served the remote stations at Midway and Fanning Island from 1923 until 1941. it…
We can't figure it out. Changehali, CC BY
By Edward Hanna, University of Sheffield
For several years now climatologists have puzzled over an apparent conundrum: why is Antarctic sea ice continuing to expand, albeit at the relatively slow rate of about one to two percent per decade, while Arctic sea ice has been declining rapidly (by some 13% per decade in late summer)?
Just a few weeks ago the Antarctic saw a third consecutive record year of sea ice coverage. The two previous records were set in 2012 and 2013.
To help get to the bottom of this mystery, one team of scientists have enlisted an…
The Arctic Ocean sea ice cover emerged 2.6 million years ago - and it hasn't changed since. Not in all of the recurring warming cycles we have had and not even in 2006, when pundits predicted it would be melted by 2014.
It wasn't always that way. Between 4 and 5 million years ago, the extent of sea ice cover in Arctic was much less than it is today. Recent IPCC reports believe that the expanse of the Arctic ice cover has been quickly shrinking since the 1970s and that 2012 was the known sea ice minimum in that time.
Researchers recently studied the trend in the sea ice extent in the…
Historical acid deposits have greatly reduced calcium levels in Canadian lakes and that is dramatically impacting populations of calcium-rich plankton such as Daphnia - water fleas that dominate these ecosystems.
Falling calcium levels mean fewer Daphnia get the nutrients they need to survive and reproduce. Because they then consume less food and are more susceptible to predators, they leave more algae for other organisms to feed on and a small jelly-clad organism called Holopedium is taking advantage of it.
Holopedium are plankton competitors of the Daphnia that use less calcium…
From 2000-2013 the global ocean surface temperature did not rise in spite of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. This Global Warming Hiatus generated a lot of public and scientific interest and no small amount of skepticism about the accuracy of the numerical models created by climate scientists. But data is another matter entirely and as of April 2014 ocean warming has picked up speed again, according to a new analysis of ocean temperature datasets.
"This summer has seen the highest global mean sea surface temperatures ever recorded since their systematic measuring started.…
Over a mile beneath the West African ocean, off the coast of Angola, are over 2,000 mounds of asphalt containing a wealth of deep-water creatures.
A paper in Deep-Sea Research 1 examined the images and data captured at the site to build an intriguing picture of the life and geology of this underwater area. The naturally-occurring asphalt mounds are made up of the same substance that covers our roads. They range in size from single football-sized blobs to small hills several hundred meters across.
It is the first time that these seabed asphalt mounds have been found on this side of…
Though he is glorified by modern science advocates, Galileo was wrong about a lot of things - for example, when his calculation that the tides only happened once a day and was at the same time was criticized, he launched into vitriolic attacks on both Kepler and math, though they both were clearly right and Galileo was clearly wrong, as every illiterate sailor knew.
For $27 Galileo could have been shown the errors of his ways. That is what Rachel MacTavish, a graduate student in the Department of Biology at Georgia Southern University, spent on buckets from a hardware store,…
Focus on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has led to a lot of confusion among the public: bad storms are caused by global warming but a lack of warming is not.
There may be a reason things don't add up, according to a paper in Science. The circulation of the ocean plays an equally important role in regulating the earth's climate, it finds. In their study, the researchers say the major cooling of Earth and continental ice build-up in the Northern Hemisphere 2.7 million years ago coincided with a shift in the circulation of the ocean – which pulls in heat and carbon dioxide in the Atlantic…
Though the continental United States hasn't had a major hurricane in almost 10 years, the rest of the world hasn't been so lucky. Japan just had a typhoon, India a cyclone, and, with Gonzalo, Bermuda is about to have its first major Atlantic hurricane in three years.
Hurricane Gonzalo has made the jump to major hurricane status and on
October
15th was a Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided imagery of the storm. According to the National Hurricane Center, Gonzalo is the first category 4 hurricane in the Atlantic basin since Ophelia in…
A new computer model has estimated ocean circulation during the last ice age, about 21,000 year ago, and believe that icebergs and meltwater from the North American ice sheet would have regularly reached South Carolina and even southern Florida.
Iceberg scour marks on the sea floor along the entire continental shelf lend weight to the model, says oceanographer Alan Condron from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Such a view of past meltwater and iceberg movement implies that the mechanisms of abrupt climate change are more complex than previously thought. "Our study is…