Oceans

Oceans

Blooming phytoplankton seed clouds in the Southern Ocean

Booming phytoplankton populations spark cloud formation in the Southern Ocean.

Climate

Current El Niño coming on strong

Meteorologists expect the ongoing El Niño to strengthen in the coming months and alter weather patterns worldwide, including bringing potential drought relief to California.

Climate

Greenland’s out-of-sync climate explained

Small variations in the sun’s activity cause big changes in Greenland’s temperatures decades later by altering ocean currents, new research suggests.

Physics

Rogue waves don’t always appear unannounced

Scientists may be able to forecast the arrival of anomalously large ocean swells, suggest scientists who analyzed the moments before rogue water waves and freak light flashes.

Climate

Real estate is tight as marine species move to cooler waters

Marine species migrating amid global warming face shrinking habitats in cooler locations.

Climate

Global warming ‘hiatus’ just an artifact, study finds

Skewed data may have caused the appearance of the recent global warming hiatus, new research suggests.

Animals

Wealth of cephalopod research lost in a 19th century shipwreck

Nineteenth-century scientist Jeanne Villepreux-Power sent her research papers and equipment on a ship that sank off the coast of France, submerging years’ worth of observations on cephalopods.

Environment

Rising dolphin deaths linked to Deepwater Horizon spill

Lung lesions and other injuries link an extensive die-off of dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

Oceans

Mysterious form of phosphorus explained

Mysterious form of phosphorus may be used as shadow currency by marine microbes, potentially upending scientists’ understanding of nutrient exchanges.

Animals

An island in the Maldives is made of parrotfish poop

Coral-eating parrotfish create much of the sediment that a reef island is made of, a new study finds.

Climate

Rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide rise unprecedented

The current rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is unprecedented over at least the last 66 million years, new research shows.

Animals

Lazy sunfish are actually active predators

Ocean sunfish were once thought to be drifting eaters of jellyfish. But they’re not, new research shows.