Latest Oceanography Stories
Researchers have shown that, by using global positioning systems (GPS) to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in just a few minutes after the earthquake onset. For the devastating Japan 2011 event, the team reveals that the analysis of the GPS data and issue of a detailed tsunami alert would have taken no more than three minutes. The results are published on 17 May in Natural Hazards and Earth System...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to the most recent Ecosystem Advisory issued by NOAA's Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC), sea surface temperatures (SSTs) for 2012 in the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem were the highest recorded in 150 years. These record SSTs are the latest in a trend of above average temperatures observed during the spring and summer seasons and part of a pattern of elevated temperatures in the Northwest Atlantic. This trend...
In 2009, the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), a body that controls and regulates coastal development in North Carolina, asked 13 members of its advisory Science Panel to prepare a report on the state of sea-level rise in North Carolina. After the report was published, there was a subsequent maelstrom regarding its utility and validity. In this month's issue of EARTH Magazine, Orrin Pilkey and Alexander Glass from Duke University describe what happened. Based on the...
ESA [ Watch The Video Freshwater Plume From SMOS And Aquarius ] The saltiness of the oceans is being closely monitored from space by both ESA’s SMOS and NASA’s Aquarius missions, but in slightly different ways. By joining forces, researchers are exploiting these complementary missions to benefit climate science even further. Everyone knows that seawater is salty, but it isn’t that obvious that the concentration of salt – the salinity – of the surface waters of the world’s...
University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Ocean acidification, which occurs as CO2 is absorbed by the world's oceans, is known to negatively impact a wide variety of marine animals ranging from massive corals to microscopic plankton. However, there is much less information about how fish may be impacted by acidification, should carbon emissions continue to rise as a result of human activities. In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National...
WASHINGTON, April 16, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Christopher Mann, director with The Pew Charitable Trusts' environmental program, issued the following statement today in response to the federal government's release of the implementation plan for the National Ocean Policy. That policy, established by executive order in July 2010, directs federal agencies to use their authority under existing law to protect, maintain, and restore the health of marine ecosystems, and to promote...
ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies Leading international marine scientists have called for the protection of more, large marine wilderness areas in a bid to shield the world’s dwindling stocks of fish from destruction. Working in the world’s largest unfished marine reserve, the remote Chagos Archipelago in the central Indian Ocean, scientists from Australia and the US have shown there is a dramatic difference in the numbers, size and variety of fish compared with...
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK) Variations in nutrient availability in the world's oceans could be a vital component of future environmental change, according to a multi-author review paper involving the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (NOCS). The paper, published this month in Nature Geoscience, reviews what we know about ocean nutrient patterns and interactions, and how they might be influenced by future climate change and other man-made factors. The authors...
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research Reliable information on the depth and floor structure of the Southern Ocean has so far been available for only few coastal regions of the Antarctic. An international team of scientists under the leadership of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, has for the first time succeeded in creating a digital map of the entire Antarctic seafloor. The International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean...
National Oceanography Centre, Southampton (UK) The first study of its kind to calculate the amount of nutrients entering and leaving the Arctic Ocean has been carried out by scientists based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. Their results, which are published this month in the Journal of Geophysical Research, show that there is a mismatch between what goes into the Arctic Ocean and what comes out. This is the first study to look at the transport of dissolved inorganic...
Latest Oceanography Reference Libraries
Baffin Bay, which is located between Baffin Island and the southwest coast of Greenland, is a marginal sea of the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s connected to the Atlantic by Davis Strait and the Labrador Sea. A narrower Nares Strait connects the Baffin Bay with the Arctic Ocean. The Baffin Bay is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that is bordered by Baffin Island towards the west, Greenland towards the east, and Ellesmere Island towards the north. It is connected to the Atlantic through the Davis...
The sea levels all around the world are rising. Current sea-level rise has the potential to affect human populations and the natural environment. Two key factors have contributed to the observed sea level rise. The first is thermal expansion: as the ocean water warms, it expands. The second is from the influence of land-based ice because of increased melting. The major store of water on land is found in the glaciers and the ice sheets. The rising of sea levels is one of several lines of...
Ocean acidification is the name that was given to the ongoing decrease in the pH of Earth’s oceans, a cause of the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. About 30 to 40 percent of the carbon dioxide that is released by humans into the atmosphere dissolves into the lakes, oceans, and rivers. To maintain the chemical equilibrium, some of it reacts with the water to create carbonic acid. Some of these extra carbonic acid molecules react with a water molecule to provide a...
Image Credit: Meteorologist Joshua Kelly When meteorologists are forecasting for ocean-going vessels, there are a few terms that we need to understand. The first term is wavelength. Wavelength is defined as the distance between two crests or between two troughs as seen in the image above. The example above highlights the crest to crest concept of wavelength. The next term that we use is wave height, and to determine this, we first must look at the wave when it passes our station. When...
Point #1: Warm finger- This region inside the area marked number 1, represents a warm finger of the ocean temperatures. What is occurring is that the warmer air is being pushed faster in this region than the surrounding locations giving us this little finger of warmer temps in that region. Point #2: Warm Eddie- This is a region of warmer temps surrounded on all sides by colder water. Eddies are a closed circulation of water in the ocean that has in this case warmer temps around it. These...
