Oceanography

Snow Depth Has Thinned On Arctic Sea Ice

Interpreting snow depth records from past decades is as much art as science. Even into the 1990s, Soviets on Arctic drifting sea ice used meter sticks and handwritten logs to record snow depth. Today, things are a lot more accurate. Airborne measurements ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 13 2014 - 10:45am

Winds Blowing May Not Prevent Ocean 'Dead Zones' Growing

By Raquel Vaquer-Sunyer, Lund University The world’s oceans are plagued with the problem of “dead zones”, areas of high nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) in which plankton blooms cause a major reduction of oxygen levels in the water. Sea creature ...

Article - The Conversation - Aug 17 2014 - 8:00am

Puzzle Of Ice Age's Rapid Climate Change Solved?

During the last ice age, a large part of North America was covered with a massive ice sheet up to 3 kilometers thick and that is a key reason why the sea level was then about 120 meters lower than it is today.  During the cold stadial periods of the last ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 19 2014 - 7:02pm

Record Decline Of Ice Sheets, Except East Antarctica

For the first time, scientists have mapped elevation changes of Greenlandic and Antarctic glaciers. For the new digital maps, the researchers evaluated all data by the CryoSat-2 altimeter SIRAL. Satellite altimeter measure the height of an ice sheet by se ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2014 - 10:30am

19,000 Years Ago, Arctic Sea Ice Influenced Force Of The Gulf Stream

Researchers have succeeded in reconstructing the sea ice conditions in the Fram Strait for this critical period at the end of the last glacial and thus in finding a direct connection between changes in sea ice cover and fluctuations in the Gulf Stream. A ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 24 2014 - 6:00pm

Global Warming Hiatus Part Of A Natural Cycle

Though the end of the 20th century looked like we were going to see runaway temperatures around the globe, that hasn't really happened despite countries like China and Russia and Mexico and India continuing to belch CO2 into the atmosphere. More than ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 21 2014 - 7:53pm

Ghost Fishing: How To Prevent Lost Traps

Thousands of fishing traps are lost each year in U.S. waters. These derelict traps continue "ghost fishing" and catch fish, crabs, and other species such as turtles, which results in losses to habitat, fisheries, and the watermen who depend on t ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 27 2014 - 11:00am

All Living Creatures Need Vitamin Thiamine To Live- Except This One

Some species of marine phytoplankton, such as the prolific bloomer Emiliania huxleyi, can grow without consuming vitamin B1 (thiamine), which contradicts the common view that E. huxleyi and many other eukaryotic microbes depend on scarce supplies of thiam ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 3:00pm

Antarctic Sea Level Rising Faster Than Elsewhere

A new analysis of satellite data from the last 19 years reveals that fresh water from melting glaciers has caused the sea level around the coast of Antarctica to rise by 2 centimeters more than the global average of 6 centimeters. Researchers at the Unive ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 1 2014 - 11:00am

Not So Simple Climate Science: Past Temperature In Greenland Adjusted

One of the common misconceptions about climate, brought about by the blight of 'framing' that afflicted science media in the last decade, is that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, solar radiation and temperature follow each other – ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 4 2014 - 5:30pm