Oceans

El Niño, the periodic warming of the tropical Pacific that reshapes weather around the world, may be about to reach a strength never recorded. Only months ago the ocean was in the opposite state: in…

Researchers have published an index that scores what people get from the ocean in 143 coastal countries and used it to project how those returns change under two emissions scenarios. The paper…

Since 1950, ships working the Mediterranean have stopped over deep water, lowered instruments on a wire and read back the temperature and the saltiness of the sea beneath them. More recently, robots…

Water enclosed by an ocean eddy leaks back out after only a few days when other eddies are nearby, according to an open-access study published Sept. 19 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. Eddies…

Researchers at Peking University and collaborating institutions have found that localized land sinking in North China's major coastal industrial region could amplify sea-level-driven flood losses by…

A robot submersible recorded 29 pieces of litter on the floor of the Mar del Plata Submarine Canyon off Argentina, between 1,120 and 3,820 meters down. The survey was published Sept. 16 in PLOS One,…

Less winter sea ice and a shift in Pacific winds have sped up the rate at which the far northern Pacific takes in heat, according to a study published Sept. 14 in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science.…

Every summer, the Yellow Sea turns green. A bloom of the alga Ulva prolifera spreads across thousands of square kilometres, the largest recurring green tide on Earth, and by the time mats of it wash…

Researchers have described a new species of bubblegum coral from the Nazca Ridge in the southeastern Pacific and found chitin, the tough material of insect shells and fungal cell walls, in its…

Stopping all new plastic from entering the ocean by 2050 would still leave microplastic accumulating in it, a modeling study published Sept. 12 in the journal Communications Earth & Environment…

Seafloor animal life in a metal-rich basin of the northwest Pacific does not simply rise as the metal does, according to a photographic survey published Sept. 10 in Communications Earth &…

A coral is not a tree, but it keeps the same kind of books. The slow-growing stony corals of the northern Gulf of Mexico add a layer of limestone every year, one on top of the last, for centuries.…