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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...

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...