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Ocean Studies May Be Heading to Space By PAUL RECER, AP Science Writer SEATTLE - The skills and technology used to explore the extreme depths of the Earth's oceans will soon find work in outer space. Scientists are making plans to probe the icy seas of Jupiter's moons and drop a lander to the bizarre gasoline-like lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn. "The possibilities of studying the extraterrestrial oceans in the solar system is now real," said Torrence Johnson, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Johnson, speaking Saturday at the national meeting of the American Association for the...

Do abrupt climate shifts occur as part of a natural cycle? Despite growing evidence that humans affect climate via urbanization and greenhouse gas emissions, the natural climate cycle may have the final say. Research from Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf at Germany`s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggests that the earth`s climate is characterized by an extraordinarily regular cycle of about 1470 years. He found that the five most recent cycles had a standard deviation of only 32 years. Rahmstorf examined ice cores from Greenland. Going back before the 20th century, when weather stations were nonexistent or widely dispersed, ice cores...

hat started as a hunch is now illuminating the origins of life. A few years back, Dr. Derek R. Lovley and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts found that a few kinds of bacteria used iron as a means of respiration (just as humans use oxygen to burn food) and that a surprising but common byproduct of this form of microbial breathing was magnetite, a hard black magnetic mineral. The scientists wondered if hidden swarms of microbes might account for the vast deposits of magnetite that dot the earth and sea. So they turned to one of the strangest, most...

Report: Coral Reefs Dying OffPollution, overfishing and climate change have severely damaged one-third of the world's coral reefs and could destroy another third in the next 30 years, scientists warned Thursday. "There are no pristine reefs left," the researchers reported in the journal Science. They predicted that without "radical changes" in efforts to save the world's reefs, "close to 60 percent of them could be lost by 2030." The report -- based on hundreds of historical documents, fishing records and scientific studies using sources as diverse as early ship's logs to modern environmental surveys -- is the most comprehensive...

Watery grave awaits famous vessel in dispute over its future For 40 years it was the mythical flagship of that most emblematic - and heavily-accented - of Frenchmen, the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau. Under his command it sailed the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Antarctic, the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangtze, revealing their murky secrets to captivated television viewers around the world. Now the Calypso, its superstructure riddled with rust and its timbers rotten, languishes unrecognised and all but unrecognisable in the dock of La Rochelle's maritime museum, as a legal wrangle threatens to send it to the place...

Scientists have identified a region of the sea floor whose depth rivals that of the Challenger Deep which, at about 11,000 metres (36,000 feet), is the lowest spot on Earth. The new location lies 200 kilometres (124 miles) further to the east, along the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific. It was found during a sonar sea-floor mapping project carried out in 1997 and 2001 by scientists from Hawaii, US. The Challenger Deep has been visited by a number of manned and unmanned submersibles since its discovery, but at present there is no craft in operation that can survive the...

BOSTON - Being thrown from a container ship, drifting for more than a decade, bobbing through three oceans — it's enough to turn a rubber duckie white.   A floating flock of the bathtub toys — along with beavers, turtles and frogs — is believed to be washing ashore somewhere along the New England coast, bleached and battered from a trans-Arctic journey. Oceanographers say the trip has taught them valuable lessons about the ocean's currents. The toys have been adrift since 29,000 of them fell from a storm-tossed container ship en route from China to Seattle more than 11 years...

<p>SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) --Chilean scientists were baffled on Tuesday by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen.</p> <p>The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy grey flesh apparently was an invertebrate.</p>

World's Deepest-Diving Submarine Missing Tuesday July 1, 2003 12:49 AM By HANS GREIMEL Associated Press Writer TOKYO (AP) - The world's deepest-diving submarine has disappeared in the choppy Pacific Ocean off Japan, a setback to deep-sea research on everything from earthquakes to rare bacteria. Kaiko, a bright yellow submarine which entered the record books in 1995 by diving 36,008 feet to the bottom of the Challenger Deep - the ocean's deepest point - snapped its tether as a typhoon approached in late May and has been missing since then, officials said Monday. Daniel J. Fornari, chief scientist for deep submergence...

Glacier Melting in Alaska IncreasingWASHINGTON (AP) -- Alaska's major glaciers are eroding so rapidly that researchers estimate they are losing 24 cubic miles of ice each year, adding to the steady rise in global sea level. In a study appearing Friday in the journal Science, University of Alaska researchers said a survey of 67 major glaciers using an airborne laser system found that the rate of melting has hastened over the past five years. ``From the mid-1950s to the mid-1990s, the glaciers lost about 52 cubic kilometers (13 cubic miles) a year,'' said Anthony A. Arendt, first author of...

Oceanographer to Receive National Medal of Science SAN DIEGO, California, May 13, 2002 (ENS) - President George W. Bush has selected Charles David Keeling, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, to receive the National Medal of Science. The National Medal of Science is the nation's highest award for lifetime achievement in scientific research. In its awards announcement, the National Science Foundation (NSF), which administers the National Medals of Science for the White House, noted that Keeling "pioneered studies on the impact of the carbon cycle to changes in climate,...