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An artist’s impression of the ancient ocean on Mars, which lasted for billions of years more than was previously thought. A massive ancient ocean once covered nearly half of the northern hemisphere of Mars making the planet a more promising place for alien life to have gained a foothold, Nasa scientists say. The huge body of water spread over a fifth of the planet’s surface, as great a portion as the Atlantic covers the Earth, and was a mile deep in places. In total, the ocean held 20 million cubic kilometres of water, or more than is found in the...

A massive outpouring of carbon dioxide from the deep ocean may have helped end the last ice age, scientists report today. There is strong evidence that changes in Earth's orbit set the pace of the planet's ice ages, by altering how much sunlight reaches the Northern Hemisphere. .. Now, scientists have documented a source for the massive exhalations of potent climate-altering gas seen at the end of the last ice age, about 16,000 years ago. ... "The oceans are leaking carbon dioxide to the atmosphere," said study co-author Gavin Foster from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. The...

A startling discovery by a graduate student has uncovered what looks like a fraud remarkably parallel to the infamous “Hockey stick” graph of Michael Mann that purported to show global temperatures skyrocketing when atmospheric CO2 rose, but only did so because “hide the decline” was the operating principle in selecting data. For those who have not been keeping up with the alarmist follies, alleged ocean acidification has joined and supplemented the rapidly-fading alleged global warming threat as an urgent reason to stop emitting CO2, and hand money and power over to regulators who would control the production of energy, the...

SUMMARY The world's oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide at an unprecedented rate and the resulting acidification is transforming marine ecosystems. Hari Sreenivasan reports on how ocean acidification is already affecting oysters and other shellfish in the U.S. Transcript HARI SREENIVASAN: Pacific oysters like the ones grown on Shina Wysocki's family farm near Olympia, Wash., are served in restaurants around the country. SHINA WYSOCKI, Chelsea Farms: We think our water tastes great here, and that makes our oysters taste great. ARTICLE TOOLS Print Email Share HARI SREENIVASAN: But there's trouble in the water. The ocean's pH, which measures the level of...

Team calls for more scepticism in marine research.___ The state of the world's seas is often painted as verging on catastrophe. But although some challenges are very real, others have been vastly overstated, researchers claim in a review paper. The team writes that scientists, journals and the media have fallen into a mode of groupthink that can damage the credibility of the ocean sciences. The controversial study exposes fault lines in the marine-science community. Carlos Duarte, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, and his colleagues say that gloomy media reports about ocean issues such as...

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachFollowing up on my previous investigations into the oceanic pH dataset, I’ve taken a deeper look at what the 2.5 million pH data points from the oceanographic data can tell us. Let me start with an overview of oceanic pH (the measure of alkalinity/acidity, with neutral being a pH of 7.0). Many people think that the ocean has only one pH  everywhere. Other people think that the oceanic pH is different in different places, but is constant over time. Neither view is correct.First, here is a view of a transect of the north Pacific ocean...

Co-authored James Doogue and JoNovaEmpirical data withheld by key scientists shows that since 1910 ocean pH levels have not decreased in our oceans as carbon dioxide levels increased. Overall the trend is messy but more up than down, becoming less acidic. So much for those terrifying oceans of acid that were coming our way.What happened to those graphs? Scientists have had pH meters and measurements of the oceans for one hundred years. But experts decided that computer simulations in 2014 were better at measuring the pH in 1910 than the pH meters were. The red line (below) is the models...

A new record has been set for the deepest fish ever seen in the world, at an incredible depth of 26,722 feet (8,145 metres). The snailfish was found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, and breaks the previous record by almost 1,640 feet (500 metres). The finding was part of an international expedition that also found many other new species at the extreme depths.

According to a study published in Nature, oceanic mercury levels have tripled since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Far surpassing earlier estimates, data collected during research cruises from 2006-2011 in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans has revealed a 340% increase in surface-level mercury content. During the cruises, deep seawater samples (depths up to 5km) were compared to surface water samples. The analysis implicates the burning of fossil fuels as the primary culprit of this dramatic rise, with mining activities thought to have also contributed a significant amount.

Scientists discovered two new species of sea-dwelling, mushroom-shaped organisms, according to a study published September 3, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Jean Just from University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues. Scientists classify organisms based on shared characteristics using a taxonomic rank, including kingdom, phylum, and species. In 1986, the authors of this study collected organisms at 400 and 1000 meters deep on the south-east Australian continental slope and only just recently isolated two types of mushroom-shaped organisms that they couldn't classify into an existing phylum. The new organisms are multicellular and mostly non-symmetrical, with a dense layer...

A new book sets out to answer some big questions about the brain and bodies of water. "Blue Mind" explores why so many of us are drawn to the ocean, and how this scientifically connects to our health and happiness, CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy reports. Most of us know that feeling of calm we get when we are on, in or just near the water. "This is what you want if you're in the midst of a stressful week," said Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist and conservationist who lives near the central coast of California. "You just want...

A container filled with millions of Lego pieces fell into the sea off Cornwall in 1997. But instead of remaining at the bottom of the ocean, they are still washing up on Cornish beaches today - offering an insight into the mysterious world of oceans and tides. "Let me see if I can find a cutlass," says Tracey Williams, poking around some large rocks on Perran Sands with a stick. She doesn't manage that, but does spot a gleaming white, pristine daisy on the beach in Perranporth, Cornwall. The flower looks good for its age, seeing as it is 17...

Scientists say rock layer hundreds of miles down holds vast amount of water, opening up new theories on how planet formed After decades of searching scientists have discovered that a vast reservoir of water, enough to fill the Earth’s oceans three times over, may be trapped hundreds of miles beneath the surface, potentially transforming our understanding of how the planet was formed. The water is locked up in a mineral called ringwoodite about 660km (400 miles) beneath the crust of the Earth, researchers say. Geophysicist Steve Jacobsen from Northwestern University in the US co-authored the study published in the journal...

China is planning to build a train line that would, in theory, connect Beijing to the United States. According to a report in the Beijing Times, citing an expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Chinese officials are considering a route that would start in the country's northeast, thread through eastern Siberia and cross the Bering Strait via a 125-mile long underwater tunnel into Alaska. "Right now we're already in discussions. Russia has already been thinking about this for many years," says Wang Mengshu, the engineer cited in the article. The proposed "China-Russia-Canada-America" line would be some 8,000 miles long, 1,800...

Indian aircraft on Friday combed Andaman and Nicobar, made up of more than 500 mostly uninhabited islands, for signs of missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) flight MH370 that evidence suggests was last headed towards the heavily forested archipelago. Popular with tourists and anthropologists alike, the islands form India’s most isolated state. They are best known for dense rainforests, coral reefs and hunter-gatherer tribes who have long resisted contact with outsiders. The search for MH370 has expanded dramatically in the past week but failed to locate the plane or any wreckage, making it one of the most baffling mysteries in aviation history.

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have shown that deep sea fault zones could transport much larger amounts of water from the Earth’s oceans to the upper mantle than previously thought.Water is carried mantle by deep sea fault zones which penetrate the oceanic plate as it bends into the subduction zone.  Subduction, where an oceanic tectonic plate is forced beneath another plate, causes large earthquakes such as the recent Tohoku earthquake, as well as many earthquakes that occur hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface.Seismic modellingSeismologists at Liverpool have estimated that over the age of the Earth, the Japan subduction...

Activists raise alarm about radiation from Japan, but nuclear researchers say their fears are unfounded.Cynthia Papermaster has stopped eating fish from the Pacific Ocean. The Berkeley resident also tries to stay out of the rain, and even leaves her rain boots outside of her house. The reason? She's worried about radioactive fallout from the accident at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station following the March 2011 tsunami and earthquake in Japan. "It's all one planet," she said. "The radiation will spread around the world." Papermaster, an activist with the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists Social Justice Committee, is part of a...

Fatwa: Women who swim in the sea commit adultery, should be punished • "When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when "the water touches the woman's private parts, she becomes an 'adulteress' and should be punished." - Summary of a report titled "The misguided Fatwas of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis", as published in the Al Masry Al Youm. A report by a committee set up by Al Azhar, one of the oldest and most prestigious Islamic universities in Cairo, to study the fatwas issued by the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis reveals how Islamists view...

Just before the weekend, the National Park Service informed charter boat captains in Florida that the Florida Bay was "closed" due to the shutdown. Until government funding is restored, the fishing boats are prohibited from taking anglers into 1,100 square-miles of open ocean. Fishing is also prohibited at Biscayne National Park during the shutdown.

How often do whales clean their ears? Well, never. And so, year after year, their ear wax builds up, layer upon layer. According to a study published Monday, these columns of ear wax contain a record of chemical pollution in the oceans. The study used the ear wax extracted from the carcass of a blue whale that washed ashore on a California beach back in 2007. Scientists at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History collected the wax from inside the skull of the dead whale and preserved it. The column of wax was almost a foot long. "It's kind...