The Great Barrier Reef is the cumulative masterpiece of generations of coral building on top of one another for as many as twenty million years, according to greatbarrierreef.org. Located in the Coral Sea, the 1,429-mile-long reef is the greatest living structure on Earth and is host to many species of marine life, including sponges, coral, […]
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization released its annual State of the Climate report on Wednesday, and the result is a grim account of the progression of the climate crisis. The report found that four key climate indicators broke records in 2021: greenhouse gas concentrations, ocean acidification, ocean temperature and sea level rise. “Today’s State of […]
A mysterious deep-sea whale washed up on a California beach on Sunday. The 16-foot beaked whale was discovered by a passerby at Mendocino County’s Jug Handle State Natural Reserve near Fort Bragg, which is 3.5 hours north of San Francisco, SFGate reported. Because beaked whales live deep beneath the waves and can dive down as far as 10,000 feet, scientists seldom get a chance to observe them.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is infamous for being the largest collection of ocean plastic in the world. Twice the size of Texas, it is home to more than 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that weigh an estimated 80,000 tonnes. But a new study made available ahead of peer review in the biology preprint service […]
The temperatures are heating up, kids are getting out of school and airline data is telling us that everyone has vacation on the brain.1 If beach trips are part of your summer agenda, we hope you’re packing your sunscreen. …But not just any sunscreen. By now, you’ve likely heard that many sunscreens contain many chemicals […]
Sponges off the coast of New Zealand have bleached for the first time following a record-breaking marine heat wave. Scientists from Victoria University of Wellington discovered the sponges in more than 12 locations near Breaksea Sound and Doubtful Sounds in Fiordland on New Zealand’s South Island, The Guardian reported. In some of the sites, up […]
Coastal wetlands are vitally important ecosystems. They store carbon dioxide, protect seaside communities from storms and provide habitats for marine life. Yet in the past two decades, Earth has lost 4,000 square kilometers (approximately 1,544 square miles) of tidal flats, tidal marshes and mangroves, a new study published in Science Thursday found. That’s a loss […]
President Joe Biden’s Interior Department confirmed on Wednesday that it has canceled three lease sales that would have opened millions of acres of ocean to oil and gas drilling. Two of the lease sales would have taken place in the Gulf of Mexico and a third would have taken place off the coast of Alaska […]
Does the ocean have a memory, and, if so, can it lose it? It turns out the answer to both questions is yes, according to a study published in Science Advances May 6. Ocean memory is defined as the persistence of conditions over time, and the climate crisis is causing it to decline. “We discovered […]