Oceanography

Mysterious Baltic Ocean Circles Explained

Are they landing marks for aliens? Craters from World War II bombs? The first pictures, which appeared in 2008 after being taken by a tourist, showed some strange circular formations in the shallow waters off the famous white cliffs of chalk on the island ...

Article - News Staff - Jan 30 2014 - 12:40pm

It's Snowmageddon In Lots Of Places, But Arctic Lakes Are On Thin Ice

It's cold and snowy just about everywhere except where you expect it. Ice in northern Alaska’s lakes during winter months is on the decline, as shown by twenty years of satellite radar imagery demonstrating how changes in our climate are affecting hig ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 7 2014 - 6:00am

Mesopelagic Fish Biomass In The Ocean Is 10X Higher Than Estimated

 Mesopelagic fishes like lantern fishes (Myctophidae) and cyclothonids (Gonostomatidae) live in the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 meters deep.  With a stock estimated at 1,000 million tons so far, mesopelagic fish dominate the total bi ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 9 2014 - 1:01pm

Where Is Global Warming Hiding?

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United States and a few countries in Europe, CO2 emissions have n ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 7 2014 - 10:26am

Taimasa: The Stench Of El Nino Coral Die-Offs

Twice in recent history, the periodic El Niño event has caused sea level drops abruptly in the tropical western Pacific. The tides remain below normal for up to a year in the South Pacific, especially around Samoa, and Samoans call the resulting wet stenc ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2014 - 11:28am

Can Climate Change Make Atlantic Deep Ocean Circulation Unstable?

Deep waters formed in the northern North Atlantic fill approximately half of the deep ocean globally. As you might gather, that impacts the circum-Atlantic climate and regional sea levels and soaks up much of the excess atmospheric carbon dioxide from ind ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 20 2014 - 4:15pm

Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap Size Driven By Temperature, Not Snowfall

Temperature has been driving the fluctuating size of Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap, not snowfall, according to a new analysis.  The Quelccaya Ice Cap is the largest ice mass in the tropics and sits 18,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes. The dr ...

Article - News Staff - Feb 25 2014 - 4:35pm

Operation IceBridge Sheds New Light On Changing Greenland Ice

Research using satellite observations and ice thickness measurements gathered by NASA's Operation IceBridge is giving new insight into one of the processes causing Greenland's ice sheet to lose mass. A team of scientists calculated the rate at w ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 10 2014 - 7:00pm

Ocean Food Web Is Key In The Global Carbon Cycle

It is said that nothing dies of old age in the ocean, that everything gets eaten and all that remains of anything is waste. But that waste is pure gold to oceanographer David Siegel, director of the Earth Research Institute at U.C. Santa Barbara. In a stu ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 12 2014 - 10:44pm

6 Glaciers Show Major Increase In West Antarctic Glacial Loss

Six glaciers in West Antarctica are moving faster than they did 40 years ago. The amount of ice draining collectively from those half-dozen glaciers increased by 77 percent from 1973 to 2013, causing global sea level to rise, according to new research.  ...

Article - News Staff - Mar 26 2014 - 3:49pm