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A radical new idea may revolutionise our understanding of one of the most vital forces on Earth Earth's magnetic field, long thought to be generated by molten metals swirling around its core, may instead be produced by ocean currents, according to controversial new research published this week. It suggests that the movements of such volumes of salt water around the world have been seriously underestimated by scientists as a source of magnetism. If proven, the research would revolutionise geophysics, the study of the Earth’s physical properties and behaviour, in which the idea that magnetism originates in a molten core is...

Note: The following post is a quote: THE BRIEFING ROOM THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary ____________________________________________________ For Immediate Release June 12, 2009 MEMORANDUM FOR THE HEADS OF EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENTS AND AGENCIES SUBJECT: NATIONAL POLICY FOR THE OCEANS, OUR COASTS, AND THE GREAT LAKES The oceans, our coasts, and the Great Lakes provide jobs, food, energy resources, ecological services, recreation, and tourism opportunities, and play critical roles in our Nation's transportation, economy, and trade, as well as the global mobility of our Armed Forces and the maintenance of international peace and security. We have a stewardship responsibility to...

The world's marine ecosystems risk being severely damaged by ocean acidification unless there are dramatic cuts in CO2 emissions, warn scientists. More than 150 top marine researchers have voiced their concerns through the "Monaco Declaration", which warns that changes in acidity are accelerating. The declaration, supported by Prince Albert II of Monaco, builds on findings from an earlier international summit. It says pH levels are changing 100 times faster than natural variability. Based on the research priorities identified at The Ocean in a High CO2 World symposium, held in October 2008, the declaration states: "We scientists who met in Monaco...

Enlarge ImageTrouble in the water. Warming seas could mean less dissolved oxygen--and more dead fish.Credit: Jupiter Images Even if humans can rein in the atmosphere's carbon dioxide content by the end of this century, large zones in the oceans could remain depleted of oxygen for hundreds or even thousands of years, researchers reveal. The lower oxygen content in the seas--a consequence of global warming--could threaten much of the world's marine life by the 22nd century, including the fish, shellfish, and other creatures on which humans depend for food. Scientists have known for centuries that warmer water holds less dissolved...

Vanishing Arctic sea ice brought on by climate change is causing the crucially important microscopic marine plants called phytoplankton to bloom explosively and die away as never before, a phenomenon that is likely to create havoc among migratory creatures that rely on the ocean for food, Stanford scientists have found. A few organisms may benefit from this disruption of the Arctic’s fragile ecology, but a variety of animals, from gray whales to seabirds, will suffer, said Stanford biological oceanographer Kevin Arrigo. "It’s all a question of timing," Arrigo said. "If migratory animals reach the Arctic and find the phytoplankton’s gone,...

Three men have drowned after being swept to sea by a rogue wave while watching the surf from a rocky outcrop along California's Central Coast. Authorities say two other men were pulled from the water Thursday afternoon and survived. The bodies of the drowned men were also recovered. Capt. Bruce Norris of the Ventura County sheriff's department says the victims are a 17-year-old boy, a 21-year-old man and a 19-year-old man. He says a 17-year-old boy and 27-year-old man survived. It wasn't immediately clear if the men were related. The wave struck just before 2 p.m. at Mugu Rock, a...

PARIS (AFP) - Scientists on Wednesday said they had discovered deep-sea viruses to be an unexpectedly potent driver of the so-called carbon cycle that sustains oceanic life and helps dampen global warming. Under the carbon cycle, microscopic algae at the sea surface suck up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Many of these microscopic creatures, called prokaryotes, become infected by naturally-occurring marine viruses. When they die, their carbon-rich remains gently sink to lower depths, where they are then cannibalistically gobbled up by other bacteria. These prokaryotes in turn become a meal for a larger life form and so on, up the...

Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing. Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past. ... "All of the different kinds of data and methods of...

Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing. Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health. Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par...

Please use links to images rather than images on this thread. Continues www.climateaudit.org/?p=3229

Secret to Towering Rogue Waves Revealed Charles Q. Choi Special to LiveScience LiveScience.com Mon Aug 4, 11:41 AM ET Deadly rogue waves 100 feet tall or higher could suddenly rise seemingly out of nowhere from the ocean, research now reveals. Understanding how such monstrous waves form could lead to ways to predict when they might emerge or, potentially, even drive them at enemy vessels, scientists added. For centuries these killer waves had been dismissed as myths - towering walls of water blamed for mysterious disappearances of ships. But on New Year's Day on 1995, a wave that reached more than...

Scientists say they have found a workable way of reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere by adding lime to seawater. And they think it has the potential to dramatically reverse CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere, reports Cath O'Driscoll in SCI's Chemistry & Industry magazine published today. Shell is so impressed with the new approach that it is funding an investigation into its economic feasibility. 'We think it's a promising idea,' says Shell's Gilles Bertherin, a coordinator on the project. 'There are potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the...

Stephen Wilde has been a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968. The first eight articles from Mr Wilde were received with a great deal of interest throughout the Co2 Sceptic community. In Stephen Wilde’s ninth and exclusive article for CO2Sceptics.Com called "Greenhouse Confusion Resolved" he answers the questions that have been raised as a result of his previous work "The Hot Water Bottle Effect". GREENHOUSE CONFUSION RESOLVED - by Stephen Wilde A short while ago I published an article on this site attempting to explain why the so called atmospheric greenhouse effect was insignificant as a planetary heat...

Enlarge ImageGo deep. Huge drilling platforms akin to oil rigs could help sequester carbon dioxide on the ocean floor.Credit: NOAA Scientists may have found a way to chemically lock up a trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide, many times the expected global carbon emissions over the next century. The plan involves injecting the greenhouse gas into huge formations of the porous volcanic rock basalt that lie on the sea floor. The approach would be expensive, however, and a host of questions remain about the technique. Scientists around the world are examining ways to permanently store vast quantities of carbon...

Sailors and scientists have been mapping ocean currents for centuries, but it turns out they’ve missed something big. How big? The entire ocean is striped with 100-mile-wide bands of slow-moving water that extend right down to the seafloor, according to a recent study.

In 1999, seismographs detected a swarm of earthquakes at a spot on the Gakkel ridge, a midocean ridge that traverses the Arctic. A few expeditions to the area, north of Siberia about 350 miles from the pole, produced indirect evidence of explosive eruptions deep on the seafloor. Explosive volcanism at such depths would be very unusual, said Robert A. Sohn of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “People had been afraid to even suggest it, because it seemed so ludicrous.” Seafloor volcanoes do erupt violently, but in relatively shallow water. The Gakkel ridge spot is 13,000 feet down, and...

New Mexico Tech chemistry professor Oliver Wingenter and his colleagues believe modest fertilization of the Southern Ocean with iron might help slow some of the effects of global warming. The concept of climate engineering – or geo-engineering – has scientists, activists and politicians debating the ethics and merits of environmental manipulation. Wingenter has conducted ship-board experiments, fertilizing two small patches of the Southern Ocean with iron to study the atmospheric effects. He said small-scale fertilization may abate the loss of Antarctic ice. The general principle involves seeding the ocean with a liquid slurry of iron sulfide. German and Indian scientists...

WASHINGTON, Jul 10, 2008 (UPI via COMTEX) -- The IBM Corp. says the U.S. government has purchased a supercomputer to provide improved data for the nation's military and commercial ocean-going vessels. IBM said the U.S. Department of Defense will use the Power 575 Hydro-Cluster, water-cooled supercomputer to provide some of the most detailed models of ocean waves, currents and temperature ever constructed to help scientists predict the behavior of the oceans with incredible precision.

MADISON - If you are curious about Earth's periodic mass extinction events such as the sudden demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, you might consider crashing asteroids and sky-darkening super volcanoes as culprits. But a new study, published online today (June 15, 2008) in the journal Nature, suggests that it is the ocean, and in particular the epic ebbs and flows of sea level and sediment over the course of geologic time, that is the primary cause of the world's periodic mass extinctions during the past 500[sc1] million years. "The expansions and contractions of those environments have pretty...

Increasing carbon dioxide emissions could leave species such as coral and sea urchins struggling to survive by the end of the century because they are making the oceans more acidic, research led by British scientists suggests. The study of how acidification affects marine ecosystems has revealed a striking impact on animal and plant life. The findings, from a team led by Jason Hall-Spencer, of the University of Plymouth, indicate that rising carbon emissions will alter the biodiversity of the seas profoundly, even before the effects of global warming are taken into account. Greater concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere...

It's the basement apartment like no other. Life has been found 1.6 kilometres beneath the sea floor, at temperatures reaching 100 °C. The discovery marks the deepest living cells ever to be found beneath the sea floor. Bacteria have been found deeper underneath the continents, but there they are rare. In comparison, the rocks beneath the sea appear to be teeming with life. John Parkes, a geobiologist at the University of Cardiff, UK, hopes his team's discovery might one day help find life on other planets. He says it might even redefine what we understand as life, and, bizarrely, what...

The future food security of millions of people is at risk because over-fishing, climate change and pollution are inflicting massive damage on the world's oceans, marine scientists warned this week. The two-thirds of the planet covered by seas provide one fifth of the world's protein -- but 75 percent of fish stocks are now fully exploited or depleted, a Hanoi conference that ended Friday was told. Warming seas are bleaching corals, feeding algal blooms and changing ocean currents that impact the weather, and rising sea levels could in future threaten coastal areas from Bangladesh to New York, experts said. "People...

The journal Science has published a paper that is the most comprehensive review to date of the effects rising ocean temperatures are having on the world's coral reefs. The Carbon Crisis: Coral Reefs under Rapid Climate Change and Ocean Acidification, co-authored by seventeen marine scientists from seven different countries, reveals that most coral reefs will not survive the drastic increases in global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 unless governments act immediately to combat current trends. The paper, the cover story for this week's issue of Science, paints a bleak picture of a future without all but the most resilient coral species...

THE UNITED NATIONS ... HARD AT WORK Venezuela's Hugo Chavez decided not to show at the meeting of the United Nations General Assembly ... he's probably too busy trying to turn back the clocks one half hour, to ensure that he is not on the same time as the "imperial United States." In the meantime, anti-Bush protestors were arrested on the streets of New York outside of the U.N. building. Business as usual. While the arrests were underway Bush was busy yanking the chains of Cuban delegates to the point where they up and left during his speech. Bush said...

Flatter oceans may have caused 1920s sea rise 17:53 24 August 2007 NewScientist.com news service Catherine Brahic The movement of a colossal "mounds" of water in the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans may have caused sea levels to suddenly begin rising more quickly in the 1920s, researchers say. Their analysis presents a more complex picture of sea-level change and suggests that the rate of change has been more dramatic than previously thought. Data collected using tidal gauges dotted along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines during the late 19th and 20th centuries suggest that sea levels suddenly began rising more quickly...

When, more than 70 years ago, William Beebe became the first scientist to descend into the abyss, he described a world of twinkling lights, silvery eels, throbbing jellyfish, living strings as “lovely as the finest lace” and lanky monsters with needlelike teeth. “It was stranger than any imagination could have conceived,” he wrote in “Half Mile Down” (Harcourt Brace, 1934). “I would focus on some one creature and just as its outlines began to be distinct on my retina, some brilliant, animated comet or constellation would rush across the small arc of my submarine heaven and every sense would be...

SAN FRANCISCO, April 30 — Can plankton help save the planet? Some Silicon Valley technocrats are betting that it just might. In an effort to ameliorate the effects of global warming, several groups are working on ventures to grow vast floating fields of plankton intended to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and carry it to the depths of the ocean. It is an idea, debated by experts for years, that still sounds like science fiction — and some scholars think that is where it belongs. But even though many questions remain unanswered, the first commercial project is scheduled to...

Linked from ClimateAudit: Abstract: "The recent cooling signal in the upper ocean reported by Lyman et al. [2006] is shown to be an artifact that was caused by a large cold bias discovered in a small fraction of Argo floats as well as a smaller but more prevalent warm bias in eXpendable BathyThermograph (XBT) data. These biases are both substantially larger than sampling errors estimated in Lyman et al. [2006]."

GALVESTON — A U.S. Navy submarine that can roll on wheels across the ocean floor will leave Pier 40 today on a weeklong expedition to search the deep for evidence of ancient human habitation. The Navy's only nuclear-power research vessel, the NR-1, will carry scientists looking for signs of early humans who may have lived on a coast that 19,000 years ago extended 100 miles farther into the Gulf of Mexico than it does today. If scientists on the expedition, dubbed "Secrets of the Gulf," find evidence that humans roamed those ancient shores, it would push back the earliest known...

OSLO (Reuters) - The world's oceans may rise up to 140 cms (4 ft 7 in) by 2100 due to global warming, a faster than expected increase that could threaten low-lying coasts from Florida to Bangladesh, a researcher said on Thursday. "The possibility of a faster sea level rise needs to be considered when planning adaptation measures such as coastal defenses," Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote in the journal Science. His study, based on air temperatures and past sea level changes rather than computer models, suggested seas could rise by 50-140 cms by 2100,...

Atmospheric scientists have reported a new and potentially important mechanism by which chemical emissions from ocean phytoplankton may influence the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight away from our planet. This intimate connection between life and the environment of Earth could have profound implications for the future of our planet's global ecosystem. Discovery of the new link between clouds and the biosphere grew out of efforts to explain increased cloud cover observed over an area of the Southern Ocean where a large bloom of phytoplankton was occurring. Based on satellite data, the researchers hypothesized that airborne particles produced by oxidation...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Clambakes, crabcakes, swordfish steaks and even humble fish sticks could be little more than a fond memory in a few decades. If current trends of overfishing and pollution continue, the populations of just about all seafood face collapse by 2048, a team of ecologists and economists warns in a report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world's ocean, we saw the same picture emerging. In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems," said the lead author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University...

Smaller and cooler than the gas giants, Neptune and Uranus are classified as ice giants. It’s a good name, since they do have large quantities of water ice mixed in with a largely hydrogen and helium atmosphere. There’s very little water at the cloud tops, but the percentage of water increases as you descend towards the heavier core. Could there be a layer on Neptune with enough pressure and temperature for liquid water to form into vast oceans? And if not Neptune, what about a Neptune-like planet orbiting another star? First, a little about Neptune. This “ice giant” planet orbits...

Link Only: Sea levels are rising faster than predicted, warns Antarctic Survey

Where are the Hurricanes? I blame global warming...http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1155133659.shtml Scott Kirwin Aug 9, 2006 Nearly a year ago the country was being slammed by hurricanes. As Americans suffered some claimed that the ferocity of Katrina and Rita was due to global warming. A search of Dean's World shows that this site is one of the few that argued against that idea over the course of 2005. So here we are, a year later. Where are the hurricanes? Where is the fury of Mother Nature? Where are her righteous swirls of rain and wind that shall smite the evil non-Kyoto Protocol signing...

The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way FOR most of the Earth's history, the planet has been either very cold, by our standards, or very hot. Fifty million years ago there was no ice on the poles and crocodiles lived in Wyoming. Eighteen thousand years ago there was ice two miles thick in Scotland and, because of the size of the ice sheets, the sea level was 130m lower. Ice-core studies show that in some places dramatic changes happened remarkably swiftly: temperatures rose by as much as 20°C in a decade. Then,...

KEY LARGO, Fla. — Marine scientists hope "test-tube coral babies" will take root to help restore a tract of reef ravaged by a 1984 ship grounding in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. A team of University of Miami marine science researchers is collecting coral eggs and sperm all this week during an annual reproductive ritual, dubbed coral spawning. Looking like an upside-down, underwater snowstorm, most corals in the Keys, Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean release eggs and sperm into the water a few days after the full moon in August. In the wild, eggs and sperm randomly mix...

WASHINGTON, DC, August 7, 2006 (ENS) – The federal government is failing to respond to alarming evidence that the oceans are in crisis, ocean experts told a Senate panel last week. Two years after a federal commission called on the Bush administration and Congress to aggressively overhaul the nation's ocean policy, key recommendations have not been implemented and critical ocean research efforts face deep funding cuts. The state of the oceans is not good and "is getting worse," said Leon Panetta, a former California Congressman and cochair of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative. Pollution, overfishing and coastal runoff are damaging...

Though much has been done to clean up our waters, much work remains. Sewer overflows and runoff from farms and city streets threaten the life-sustaining properties of our waters, endanger human health and wildlife, and result in thousands of beach closings each year. NRDC works to continue reductions in industrial water pollution while pressing for effective pollution controls on agriculture, logging and other sources previously exempt from them. We help develop and promote strong federal laws and regulations to address polluted runoff, raw sewage discharges, and factory farm wastes and we sue polluters when they violate the Clean Water Act.

Coastside commercial fishermen were pleased that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Friday signed the Sustainable Oceans Act, severely restricting future fish-farming along the California coast. The act, authored by Palo Alto Democrat Joe Simitian, allows ocean farming operations but requires stringent environmental protections that industry experts are calling the toughest in the nation. Coastside fisherman Pietro Parravano, president of the Institute of Fishery Resources, said Saturday the new rules should help protect marine ecosystems and water quality. He said the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Association had lobbied for passage of the act. There are currently no finfish aquaculture operations on the...

by Edward Hudgins What do Britain's astronomer royal Martin Rees and Australian environmentalist David Leary of Macquarie University have in common? Both are concerned that someone might be making profits on outer and inner space frontiers where there are no government regulators or bureaucrats to be found. In 2002 Rees regretted the possibility that private companies might get to Mars before governments do and make it into another Wild West. Today Leary laments that six companies are selling products derived from the deep ocean and that eight other companies are moving in to make bucks at the bottom of the...

Tiny amounts of salt and dust trapped in the Antarctic ice sheet for the last 740,000 years shed new light on changes to the Earth's climate. The results, published this week in the journal Nature, come from the team who extracted a 3 km long ice core from Dome C, high on East Antarctica's plateau - the oldest continuous climate record obtained from ice cores so far. Since reporting in 2004 that the Earth experienced eight climate cycles (each consisting of an ice age and warm period) the team have been analysing the chemical impurities in the cores to unravel...

Ocean temperatures might have risen even higher during the last century if it weren't for volcanoes that spewed ashes and aerosols into the upper atmosphere, researchers have found. The eruptions also offset a large percentage of sea level rise caused by human activity. Using 12 new state-of-the-art climate models, the researchers found that ocean warming and sea level rise in the 20th century were substantially reduced by the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in Indonesia. Volcanic aerosols blocked sunlight and caused the ocean surface to cool. "That cooling penetrated into deeper layers of the ocean, where it remained for...

During the course of World War II, Winston Churchill termed military operations in the air, on land and at sea--triphibious warfare. And by August of 1945, The United States had become very good at their application.

THEY are called echizen kurage and they sound like monsters from the trashier reaches of Japanese science fiction. They are 6ft wide and weigh 450lb (200kg), with countless poisonous tentacles, they have drifted across the void to terrorise the people of Japan. Vast armadas of the slimy horrors have cut off the country’s food supply. As soon as one is killed more appear to take its place. Finally, the quarrelsome governments of the region are banding together to unite against the enemy. Echizen kurage is not an extraterrestrial invader, but a giant jellyfish that is devastating the livelihoods of...

Scientists say they have measured a significant slowing in the Atlantic currents that carry warm water toward Northern Europe. If the trend persists, they say, the weather there could cool considerably in coming decades. Some climate experts have said the potential cooling of Europe was paradoxically consistent with global warming caused by the accumulation of heat-trapping "greenhouse" emissions. But several experts said it was premature to conclude that the new measurements, to be described today in the journal Nature, meant that such a change was already under way. The currents, branching off from the Gulf Stream, are part of an...

LONG BEACH - A male fish off the Southern California coast is getting in touch with its feminine side. And that has some scientists worried. Kevin Kelley, a professor of environmental endocrinology at Cal State Long Beach, is part of a team studying a species of male flatfish in Southern California waters that has been found to have high levels of estrogen, which appear to be causing feminization. Kelley and other researchers believe that the treated wastewater draining through underground pipes into waters off Santa Monica, Huntington Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula contains human estrogen hormones expelled in human...

Please read note in first comment. "It may seem strange that so much effort* is being focused on an animal that 25 years ago was known to only a handful of Antarctic scientists and that went by the ungainly name of Patagonian toothfish. But Chilean sea bass today have become the signature species in a battle of global proportions. Put in very blunt terms, the world is running out of fish. According to a study published in July in Science, marine species diversity has declined by 10 to 50 percent in the last half-century, and a 2003 report found that...

Marine Organisms Threatened By Increasingly Acidic Ocean Corals and Plankton May Have Difficulty Making Shells Every day, the average person on the planet burns enough fossil fuel to emit 24 pounds of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, out of which about nine pounds is then taken up by the ocean. As this CO2 combines with seawater, it forms an acid in a process known as ocean acidification. A new study by an international team of oceanographers published in the September 29, 2005 issue of Nature reports that ocean acidification could result in corrosive chemical conditions much sooner than previously thought....

Hurricane Katrina was barely gone when the anti-God crowd was already at it. Smugly asking things like, “If there was a designer then what about this destructive hurricane?” As usual they were asking questions not caring if there was an answer and they obviously didn’t bother to look. There has been a lot of talk about how the fundamental constants of the universe and everything they control are fine-tuned to allow life here on Earth. Just a minute change in any one of hundreds of such constants and life would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. If all such constants...