Search Results for: ocean

North-Western Europe could be in for some sudden climatic surprises in the future, say scientists speaking at the launch of a new book on global environmental change.

North-Western Europe is kept warm by an ocean current known as the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream which brings warm water from the tropics to the north. This current is sensitive to global warming and could slow down, or even break down as a result of increasing global temperatures.

Studies of

NASA’s QuikSCAT satellite is providing meteorologists with accurate data on surface winds over the global oceans, leading to improved 2- to 5- day forecasts and weather warnings. The increased accuracy, already being used in hurricane forecasts, is bringing economic savings and a reduction in weather-related loss of life, especially at sea, according to a recent NASA study.

Robert Atlas, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., demonstrated the initial

The oceans have their desert zones, in other words areas poor in nutrients and unfavourable for phytoplankton to develop. Half of the southern Pacific thus consists of great expanses of warm water with an average temperature of 28 °C (a greater surface area than Europe), which receives no input of deep-source cold water, rich in nutrient salts.

However, in 2000 analyses of satellite observations on the colour of the ocean conducted by American scientists revealed unusually high concentrati

Medium to large earthquakes occurring along the central San Andreas Fault appear to cluster at regular three-year intervals – a previously unnoticed cycle that provides some hope for forecasting larger quakes along this and other California faults.

A study by University of California, Berkeley, seismologists shows a higher probability of moderate to large quakes – magnitude 4, 5 and 6 – just as the frequency of smaller quakes, called microquakes, begins to increase along the northern half of

Sea water being churned in the ocean off Antarctica may be having a greater effect on global patterns of ocean movement than previously thought, according to new research reported in this week’s edition of the international journal Science (9 January 2004).

The research, lead by scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA), shows that “remarkably intense and widespread” mixing of water in the Southern Ocean occurs over large regions where the ocean bed is rough.

The main aut

New findings pose a challenge for cold dark matter theory

“The universe is always more complicated than our cosmological theories would have it,” says Nigel Sharp, program officer for extra-galactic astronomy and cosmology at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Witness a collection of new and recently announced discoveries that, taken together, suggest a considerably more active and fastmoving epoch of galaxy formation in the early universe than prevailing theories had called for.