Search Results for: Ocean

Newfound differences in turtle behavior pose a conservation challenge

Studying members of a large population of loggerhead sea turtles that nest on the Cape Verde islands off of West Africa, researchers have found an unexpected dichotomy in turtle behavior: While some turtles leave the nesting grounds to feed on bottom-dwelling sea life in shallow coastal waters, others leave Cape Verde to roam the much deeper open ocean along the African coast and exhibit a distinct feeding strategy.

Since late 2004, a large outbreak of chikungunya fever in the Indian Ocean has caused a public health crisis and alarmed international experts. A team of scientists led by Sylvain Brisse (of the Pasteur Institute) now reports the first molecular data on the viruses involved in the outbreak in the international open-access journal PLoS Medicine.

The outbreak affects the populations of Comoros, Mayotte, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles, and Réunion. It is much larger than any previous out

When sea ice freezes, its salt separates out, and heavy salty water sinks to the bottom. However, it turns out that this process take place more slowly than we thought, which may have implications for our climate models.

Lars Henrik Smedsrud of the Bjerknes Centre at the University of Bergen and Ragnheid Skogseth of the University Course on Svalbard have been studying what happens when new ice and brash ice form at sea – a subject which they have been remarkably alone in study

From May 22-30, Harbor Branch scientists, along with colleagues from the University of Miami, will use the Harbor Branch Johnson-Sea-Link II submersible to explore for the first time newly discovered deep-sea reefs between Florida and the Bahamas. The reefs were discovered in 2,000 to 2,900 feet of water last December by a University of Miami team using advanced sonar techniques. A primary goal of the upcoming expedition, which is funded largely by the State of Florida’s “Florida Oceans Ini

Work in an MIT lab may help energy companies withdraw millions of additional barrels of oil from beneath the sea floor. Typically, companies recover only 30 percent to 40 percent of the oil in a given reservoir. Since a single reservoir may contain a billion barrels total, increasing that “recovery efficiency” by even a single percentage point would mean a lot of additional oil. Toward that end, Assistant Professor David Mohrig of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences

Ecologists have at last got a view of sperm whales’ behaviour during their long, deep dives, thanks to the use of recently developed electronic “dtags”. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Animal Ecology, sperm whales – like bats – use echolocation consistently to track down their prey at depth.

Working in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Ligurian Sea, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the Universit