Oceans

The uncertainty in the global ocean heat record has narrowed roughly six-fold since the 1950s, according to a study published Aug. 29, 2026, in Nature Communications by a team led by the Institute of…

A deep-learning model can estimate wave conditions about a kilometer off the coast from coarse global offshore data, a team at Sun Yat-sen University reports in Communications Earth & Environment. In…

One autumn, a narwhal swimming up Nordvestfjord, a long, ice-covered arm of water in East Greenland, dove down through the cold surface layer into the warmer, saltier water beneath it. Behind the…

A remotely operated underwater vehicle sent to the submerged front of a South Greenland glacier recorded large numbers of zooplankton, fish and other organisms that appear to respond to material shed…

Groundwater extraction is driving land in northern China down by 15.1 millimeters a year, against a natural geological baseline of between -0.5 and 0.5 millimeters a year, according to a sea-level…

The coral reef at Bar Al Hikman in Oman has been losing area continuously since the mid-1980s rather than in pulses driven by storms, according to a 40-year satellite reconstruction published Aug. 25…

Take every stretch of open ocean outside the polar seas, average the surface temperature across all of it, and the number you get has a season of its own. It is not the season most people live in. It…

On any beach, the sea spends the day walking up the sand and back down again. To the people who use satellites to track eroding coastlines, that walk is a nuisance: before an image of a waterline can…

Corals bleached at seven of the eight sites surveyed along Japan's coast after the marine heatwaves of 2024, including cool temperate waters far north of the country's tropical reefs, a team led by…

A scenario in which every foreign bottom-trawl catch was kept for use in the country whose waters it came from would move up to 10.6 million people from inadequate to adequate nutrient intake,…

Plankton growth in the North Water Polynya, a stretch of open water that stays clear between Greenland and Ellesmere Island while the sea around it freezes, has remained steady across 20 years of…

Most of the plastic that enters the ocean does not stay at sea. It comes back to land, washing onto beaches, piling up in mangroves, fouling the same coastlines it drifted away from. The hard…