Search Results for: Ocean

Imagine a lake three times the size of the present-day Lake Ontario breaking through a dam and flooding down the Hudson River Valley past New York City and into the North Atlantic. The results would be catastrophic if it happened today, but it did happen some 13,400 years ago during the retreat of glaciers over North America and may have triggered a brief cooling known as the Intra-Allerod Cold Period.

Assistant Scientist Jeffrey Donnelly of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Scientists have sequenced the genome of the microorganism Silicibacter pomeroyi, a member of an abundant group of marine bacteria known to impact the Earth’s ecosystem by releasing and consuming atmospheric gases. This genetic blueprint provides insight into the biochemical pathways the bacterium uses to regulate its release of sulfur and carbon monoxide. Atmospheric sulfur serves as a catalyst for cloud formation, in turn, directly affecting the planet’s temperature and energy regula

Experiments led by Nicolas Dauphas of the University of Chicago and Chicago’s Field Museum have validated some controversial rocks from Greenland as the potential site for the earliest evidence of life on Earth.

“The samples that I have studied are extremely controversial,” said Dauphas, an Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and a Field Museum Associate. Some scientists have claimed that these rocks from Greenland’s banded iron for

This ultra high-resolution sea surface temperature map of the Mediterranean could only have been made with satellites. Any equivalent ground-based map would need almost a million and a half thermometers placed into the water simultaneously, one for every two square kilometres of sea.

This most detailed ever heat map of all 2 965 500 square kilometres of the Mediterranean, the world’s largest inland sea is being updated on a daily basis as part of ESA’s Medspiration proje

Unexpected findings about the genetic makeup of a marine microbe have given scientists a new perspective on how bacteria make a living in the ocean – a view that may prove useful in wider studies of marine ecology.

By deciphering and analyzing the DNA sequence of Silicibacter pomeroyi, a member of an important group of marine bacteria, scientists found that the metabolic strategies of marine bacterioplankton are more diverse and less conventional than previously thought.

If global warming shuts down the thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, the result could be catastrophic climate change. The environmental effects, models indicate, depend upon whether the shutdown is reversible or irreversible.

“If the thermohaline shutdown is irreversible, we would have to work much harder to get it to restart,” said Michael Schlesinger, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a co-author of a re