Search Results for: Ocean

Satellite measurements of a steep difference in sea surface height between the western and eastern tropical Pacific support predictions that a La Niña event is in the offing. El Niño’s chillier sister, La Niña is linked to opposing but equally wide-ranging shifts in weather patterns.

Hundreds of years ago fishermen off the west coast of Peru noted how periodically around Christmas time the waters grew unusually warm and fish became scarce: a phenomenon they called ‘the Chris

An extensive study on the Indo-Pacific coral reefs, about to be published in the 2nd of March issue of the journal Nature[1] challenges the present conservation protocols for these organism and calls for important changes in the way that protected areas are being established all over the world, in order to be able to stop the present (fast) rate of extinction observed in coral reefs.

A major ongoing discussion in ecology is what determines the biodiversity (which species and i

Everyday ice used to chill that glass of lemonade has helped researchers better understand the internal structure of icy moons in the far reaches of the solar system. A research team has demonstrated a new kind of “creep” or flow in a high-pressure form of ice by creating in a laboratory the conditions of pressure, temperature, stress, and grain size that mimic those in the deep interiors of large icy moons.

High-pressure phases of ice are major components of the giant icy moons of the o

In a simple world rivers would flow in straight lines, every airplane ride would be smooth, and we would know the daily weather 10 years into the future. But the world is not simple — it is turbulent.

That’s good news, since turbulence helps drive natural processes essential for life. Unfortunately it also means we are never 100 percent sure it won’t rain on Saturday.

“Turbulence is the last major unsolved problem of classical physics,” explains Eberhard Bod

Data from ESA’s Huygens probe have been used to validate a new model of the evolution of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, showing that its methane supply may be locked away in a kind of methane-rich ice.

The presence of methane in Titan’s atmosphere is one of the major enigmas that the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini-Huygens mission is trying to solve.

Titan was revealed last year to have spectacular landscapes apparently carved by liquids. The Cassini-Huygens mission als

Investigators retrieve textbook-quality coral fossil sampling to document history of paleoclimatic change

An international team of scientists, supported by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, reunited at the University of Bremen to analyze a trove of coral fossil samples retrieved from Tahitian waters during October and November 2005. Two weeks ago, led by chief scientists from France and Japan, the science party started their year-long analysis of 632 meters of fossil materi