Latest Chemical oceanography Stories

WASHINGTON -- The amount of salt dissolved in streams in the Northeast is rising and chemicals used to clear snow and ice from the roads are being blamed. "We're basically hardening the watersheds and feeding them a high-salt diet. There is a direct connection between the number of driveways and parking lots we have and the quality of our water," said Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Frostburg, Md. Kaushal and colleagues tested water in...

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The dead zone off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas is nearly the size of Connecticut and much larger than federal researchers had predicted earlier this year, according to a new survey. An annual weeklong cruise led by researchers with the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium found an area of low-oxygen measuring 4,564 square miles and extending from the Mississippi River to the Texas border. On average, the dead zone has measured about 4,800 square miles since 1985....

NEW ORLEANS -- The dead zone off the coasts of Louisiana and Texas should be considerably smaller than usual this year - about the size of Rhode Island, rather than larger than Jamaica, researchers say. That's because the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers are carrying much less nitrogen and other nutrients than usual into the Gulf of Mexico, according to scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Nancy Rabalais, head of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium...

Stanford, CA. A report issued by the Royal Society in the U.K. sounds the alarm about the world's oceans. "If CO2 from human activities continues to rise, the oceans will become so acidic by 2100 it could threaten marine life in ways we can't anticipate," commented Dr. Ken Caldeira, co-author of the report and a newly appointed staff scientist at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, California.* The report on ocean acidification was released today by...

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP) -- Through mid-July, scientists from NOAA's National Coast Data Development Center and the agency's Fisheries Service at Stennis Space Center will look at data about dissolved oxygen from the "dead zone" areas in the Gulf of Mexico. The scientists believe the zone forms in June and stretches 5,000-square-miles from the mouth of the Mississippi River toward the Texas coast. The condition, known as hypoxia, occurs when the amount of dissolved oxygen in the water...

MOSS LANDING - One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor off the coast of Central California. After analyzing hundreds of hours of deep-sea video, Bruce Robison and his colleagues found that "sinkers""”the cast-off mucus nets of small...

MOSS LANDING - One of the biggest questions in modern oceanography is how animals in the deep sea get enough to eat. Marine biologists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently published a paper that helps answer this question, at least for animals that live on the deep seafloor off the coast of Central California. After analyzing hundreds of hours of deep-sea video, Bruce Robison and his colleagues found that "sinkers""”the cast-off mucus nets of small...

SANTA CRUZ, CA - Most of the excess carbon dioxide pouring into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels will ultimately be absorbed by the oceans, but it will take about 100,000 years. That is how long it took for ocean chemistry to recover from a massive input of carbon dioxide 55 million years ago, according to a study published this week in the journal Science. James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, led an international team of...