Search Results for: Ocean

Research could lead to better understanding of typhoons, oceanic flows

For decades, scientists who study hurricanes, whirlpools and other large fluid vortices have puzzled over precisely how these vast swirling masses of gas or liquid sustain themselves. How do they acquire the energy to keep moving? The most common theory sounded like it was lifted from Wall Street: The large vortices collect power as smaller vortices merge and combine their assets, in the same way that small co

Conservationists should be acting now to protect mammals such as North American reindeer which risk extinction in the future as the human population grows, according to research published today.

The research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals areas with the potential to lose species that are not presently in danger. Species in these ’hotspots’ have a latent risk of extinction; that is, they are currently less threatened than thei

Shipping companies can route ships more safely and efficiently. Ocean search-and-rescue can operate more effectively. Meteorologists and climatologists now have a tool to provide long-range weather prediction more accurately. Navies too can perform more accurate anti-submarine surveillance. And environmental managers now have a mechanism to track pollution, algal blooms, or emergent situations such as oil spills. And, this is all due to a unique three-dimensional ocean model that has been developed

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