Oceanography

A recent review of research on the response of plants, marine life and animals to declining sea ice in the Arctic found that sea ice decline and warming trends are changing the vegetation in nearby arctic coastal areas. ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2013 - 1:03pm

Arctic Sea Ice Minimum Won't Match Last Year's Record Low

The annual melting of sea ice in the Arctic is approaching its yearly "minimum," the time when the floating ice cap covers less of the Arctic Ocean than at any other period during the year, and there is some good news- this year's summer ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 24 2013 - 12:03pm

Moss And Microbes Reveal Impact Of Warming Antarctic Peninsula

By analyzing a 150-year-old moss bank on the Antarctic Peninsula, researchers describe an unprecedented rate of ecological change since the 1960s, driven by warming temperatures. The researchers looked to the Antarctic Peninsula because it is one of the ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2013 - 2:10pm

West Antarctica Ice Sheet Existed 20 Million Years Earlier Than Believed

The ice sheet on West Antarctica just got a little older- 20 million years or so. The findings indicate that ice sheets first grew on the West Antarctic subcontinent at the start of a global transition from warm greenhouse conditions to a cool icehouse cl ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2013 - 1:17pm

Coherent Lagrangian Vortices: Our Oceans Have Their Own Kind Of Black Holes

Mild winters in Northern Europe are thanks to the Gulf Stream, which makes up part of those ocean currents spanning the globe that have always impacted the climate. Yet our climate is also influenced by huge eddies, black holes of turbulence over 90 miles ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 23 2013 - 10:54am

Continental Ice Sheet Didn't Form During Late Cretaceous Period

New evidence suggests than no continental ice sheet formed during the Late Cretaceous Period more than 90 million years ago, when the climate was much warmer than it is today, though it has been commonly believed to have happened that way. ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2013 - 5:10pm

Huge Ice Channels Discovered Beneath Antarctic Ice Shelf

Huge ice channels almost as tall as the Eiffel tower have been discovered beneath a floating ice shelf in Antarctica. They are 250 meters high, stretch hundreds of kilometers along the ice shelf, and likely influence the stability of the ice shelf. The s ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 6 2013 - 8:01pm

2 Degrees Warming Might Put 500 Million People At Risk Of Water Scarcity

With 99% of the Earth's water unused, it might not seem like there could be a water scarcity issue, but water tends to be boom and bust. Many of the poorest regions don't have access to potable water and new estimates by the Potsdam Institute fo ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 8 2013 - 10:18am

Greenhouse Icehouse-Toxic Ocean Conditions And Extinction 93.9 Million Years Ago

After oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose about 600 million years ago, earth got the first proliferation of animal life. Between then and now, numerous short lived biotic events took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically. ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 29 2013 - 9:58am

Mapping Greenland's Ice Sheet Summer Melt

NASA is going to measure changes in the height of the Greenland Ice Sheet and surrounding Arctic sea ice produced by a single season of summer melt, which will give researchers a more comprehensive view of seasonal changes and provide context for measurem ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 2 2013 - 11:45am