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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...

With the summer in full swing and temperatures rising into the mid-90s, it may seem like a great idea to take a cool dip in the ocean, but according to a new report, some beach-goers may be getting more than they bargained for. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a non-profit environmental group, published on Wednesday its 22nd annual report which showed that storm water runoff and sewage pollution continue to spoil many of America's shores. The study titled ‘Testing the Waters: A Guide to Water Quality at Vacation Beaches’ examined the results of water testing data at more than...

LIVERMORE, Calif., June 11 (UPI) -- Human activity has been the primary cause of global ocean warming during the past 50 years, a team of U.S. and international researchers says. Scientists say the observed ocean warming in the last 50 years is consistent with climate models only if the models include the effects of observed increases in greenhouse gas during the 20th century. "We have taken a closer look at factors that influence these results," lead author Peter Gleckler at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said. "The bottom line is that this study substantially strengthens the conclusion that...

A video salute to all you sailors and mariners out there. You're the bravest people on earth.

President Barack Obama has an ambitious plan for Washington bureaucrats to take command of the oceans—and with it control over much of the nation’s energy, fisheries, even recreation in a move described by lawmakers as the ultimate power grab to zone the seas. The massive undertaking also includes control over key inland waterways and rivers that reach hundreds of miles upstream, and began with little fanfare when Obama signed an executive order in 2010 to protect the aquatic environment. “This one to me could be the sleeping power grab that Americans will wake up to one day and wonder what...

PDF version Imagine a one-celled organism the size of a mango. It's not science fiction, but fact: scientists have cataloged dozens of giant one-celled creatures, around 4 inches (10 centimeters), in the deep abysses of the world's oceans. But recent exploration of the Mariana Trench has uncovered the deepest record yet of the one-celled behemoths, known as xenophyophores. Found at 6.6 miles beneath the ocean's surface, the xenophyophores beats the previous record by nearly two miles. The Mariana Trench xenophyophores were discovered by dropcams, developed by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and National Geographic, which are unmanned HD cameras 'dropped'...

Earth's temperatures will likely stabilize for a period as deep ocean waters absorb enough heat to mask the effects of global warming for up to a decade, a new study indicates. Earth's "missing heat" has long been a mystery for climate scientists as the last decade saw an incessant growth in greenhouse gas emissions did not elevate surface temperature as much as expected. The joint U.S.-Australian study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the "missing heat" during periods such as the past decade when...

BRUSSELS (AP) — Warning: The warming of the world's oceans can cause serious illness and may cost millions of euros (dollars) in health care. That is the alarm sounded in a paper released online Tuesday on the eve of a two-day conference in Brussels. The 200-page paper is a synthesis of the findings of more than 100 projects funded by the European Union since 1998. It was produced by Project CLAMER, a collaboration of 17 European marine institutes. The paper says the rising temperature of ocean water is causing a proliferation of the Vibrio genus of bacteria, which can cause...

Thirty-eight million years ago, tropical jungles thrived in what are now the cornfields of the American Midwest and furry marsupials wandered temperate forests in what is now the frozen Antarctic. The temperature differences of that era, known as the late Eocene, between the equator and Antarctica were half what they are today. A debate has been ongoing in the scientific community about what changes in our global climate system led to such a major shift from the more tropical, greenhouse climate of the Eocene to modern and much cooler climates. New research results published in this week's issue of the...

Osama bin Laden's personal files revealed a brazen idea to hijack oil tankers and blow them up at sea last summer, creating explosions he hoped would rattle the world's economy and send oil prices skyrocketing, the U.S. said Friday. The newly disclosed plot showed that while bin Laden was always scheming for the next big strike that would kill thousands of Americans, he also believed a relatively simpler attack on the oil industry could create a worldwide panic that would hurt Westerners every time they gassed up their cars. U.S. officials said the tanker idea, included in documents found in...

Piece by piece, America being given away “It’s too late; it’ll just have to be stopped in the Senate,” Tom, the young male answering the phone in U.S. Rep. John Boehner’s (R-Ohio)Washington D.C. office, said about HR 3534 (CLEAR Act). This is the globalist bill designed to give away our land, oceans, adjacent land masses and Great Lakes to an international body, and makes us pay $900 million per year until 2040. HR 3534 is a thinly disguised permanent roadblock to American energy which drives American companies out of the Gulf, delays future drilling, increases dependency on foreign oil, implements...

Climate scientist Roger Pielke, Sr has noted that land surface temperature records (which comprise the vast majority of temperature records prior to the satellite era (1979-)) are unreliable due to land use changes and urban heat island effects, and that we should therefore look to ocean heat content changes as the most reliable metric for assessing global heating and cooling. The oceans cover 71% of the global surface area and hold at least 1000 times more heat than the atmosphere. Many have claimed that the 'missing heat' from 'anthropogenic global warming' has gone into the oceans, even though the heat...

Now it’s a Phytoplanktonic panic Posted on July 30, 2010 by Anthony Watts Borrowing a phrase from NSIDC’s Dr. Mark Serreze, Phytoplankton are now apparently in a “Death Spiral”. See Death spiral of the oceans and the original press release about an article in Nature from a PhD candidate at Dalhousie University, which started all this. I’m a bit skeptical of the method which they describe in the PR here: A simple tool known as a Secchi disk as been used by scientists since 1899 to determine the transparency of the world’s oceans. The Secchi disk is a round disk,...

NOTE The following text is a quote: www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/executive-order-stewardship-ocean-our-coasts-and-great-lakes The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release July 19, 2010 Executive Order--Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Purpose. The ocean, 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...

NEW YORK (AFP) – The world faces the nightmare possibility of fishless oceans by 2050 without fundamental restructuring of the fishing industry, UN experts said Monday. "If the various estimates we have received... come true, then we are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish," Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN Environment Program's green economy initiative, told journalists in New York. A Green Economy report due later this year by UNEP and outside experts argues this disaster can be avoided if subsidies to fishing fleets are slashed and fish are given protected...

NUSA DUA, Indonesia (AFP) – UN environmental experts Thursday issued an urgent call to study the crucial role the oceans -- as massive carbon stores -- can play in the fight against global warming. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched the "Blue Carbon" initiative together with the Indonesian government Thursday on the resort island of Bali. "A global scientific study of the role of marine and coastal ecosystems in meeting the climate change challenges is urgently needed in order to improve understanding," UNEP director Achim Steiner said on the sidelines of the gathering of climate experts and environment ministers....

By melting and resolidifying diamond, scientists explain how such liquid diamond oceans may be possible.Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. The research, based on first detailed measurements of the melting point of diamond, found diamond behaves like water during freezing and melting, with solid forms floating atop liquid forms. The surprising revelation gives scientists a new understanding about diamonds and some of the most distant planets in our solar system. "Diamond is a relatively common material on Earth, but...

Earlier today scientists funded by NOAA and the National Science Foundation released video of an underwater volcano eruption. This eruption is the deepest erupting volcano ever discovered and recorded. The video of this eruption is more than awesome, it is spectacular. In an area near Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the West Mata volcano was discovered in May. The volcano lies almost 4,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. The scientists say they found a type of lava they have never seen erupting from an active volcano before. They also witnessed molten lava flowing across the deep-ocean seafloor for...

MONTEREY BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, Calif. – Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases. These foragers of the sanctuary's frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California's coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification. "We're having a change in water chemistry, so 20...

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...