Search Results for: ocean

China’s rainy season has led to serious flooding in the north-east and south of the country. A joint Chinese-European team is gathering Envisat radar imagery of the developing situation to give the authorities a way to swiftly assess affected areas and plan their responses.

Summer flooding is nothing new in these regions of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), though this year it is proving particularly severe, with more than 800 casualties countrywide and 2.45 million peop

A colourful summer marine phytoplankton bloom fills much of the Baltic Sea in this Envisat image.

Phytoplankton are microscopic marine plants that drift on or near the surface of the sea, by far the most abundant type of life found in the ocean. Just like plants on land they employ green-pigmented chlorophyll for photosynthesis – the process of turning sunlight into chemical energy.

While individually microscopic, phytoplankton chlorophyll collectively tints the surrou

Being seasick is not a problem for scientists on a major expedition now under way in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. That’s because most of the researchers investigating the eerie Lost City hydrothermal vent field are working “aboard” a landlocked science command center in Seattle.

Only four scientists are with University of Rhode Island oceanographer Bob Ballard aboard the Ronald H. Brown, a research vessel operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrat

First global map reveals rapidly shrinking hotspots for tuna, marlin, swordfish

Diversity has declined by up to 50% over 50 years due to fishing

A new study released in Science (via Science Express http://www.sciencexpress.org) on July 28th reveals a striking downward trend in the diversity of fish in the open ocean – the largest and least known part of our planet. Teasing apart the effects of climate change and fishing over the past 50 years, the authors show a clear

In Jules Verne’s nineteenth century classic Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an Edinburgh professor and colleagues follow an explorer’s trail down an extinct volcano to the Earth’s core. Ah, fantasy! Here’s reality: For more than a century after Verne wrote his novel, geophysicists have had only one tool with which to peer into our planet’s heart-seismology, or analysis of vibrations produced by earthquakes and sensed by thousands of instrument stations worldwide. But now, geophysicists have

Hurricane Emily’s 140-mile-per-hour winds, which last week blew roofs off hotels and flattened trees throughout the Caribbean, owed their force to an unlikely culprit – ocean spray.

According to a new study by two University of California, Berkeley, mathematicians and their Russian colleague, the water droplets kicked up by rough seas serve to lubricate the swirling winds of hurricanes and cyclones, letting them build to speeds approaching 200 miles per hour. Without the l