It isn’t official yet, but 2014 appears to have been the hottest year on the world temperature record. In December, during the U.N. climate talks in Lima, Peru (COP20), the World Meteorological Organization announced in a provisional statement that this conclusion about 2014 weather and climate was virtually certain. WMO bases its report on datasets
Underwater habitat at Aquarius Reef Base (photo provided to Flickr courtesy of Stephen Frink, www.stephenfrink.com/) On July 2, 2014, ocean scientists who have spent the last 31 days living in an ocean-floor habitat 63 feet underwater will decompress and return to the surface. They’ve been down there on “Mission 31” intensively studying ocean acidification and climate
Fabien Cousteau, ocean explorer and grandson of famed Jacques-Yves Cousteau, began a historic subsea mission on Sunday. He’s studying ocean impacts of climate change (especially acidification, which occurs as the sea absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide), effects of plastic and other pollution on marine life, and overfishing of marine resources, which diminishes the ocean’s biodiversity. You
Just to add to the worries you’ll have for New Year 2013, scientists are growing ever-more concerned with the possibility that corals could retreat from equatorial seas and oceans due to the continual warming of our planet. An international team of marine researchers warned Tuesday that, based on the fossil coral record from the
An Australian scientist told the Australian Academy of Science’s Earth System Outlook Conference in Canberra that Australia could be a world leader in developing marine reserves that are able to keep pace with climate change and absorb the impact of warming oceans, storms, and flood events. “The challenge we face is that a marine reserve or
A new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found that the Great Barrier Reef in Australia has lost half of its coral in the last 27 years thanks to storm damage, crown of thorns starfish and bleaching. The study, conducted by researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science
The current global hope regarding climate change is that we can minimize the warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, however this will not be enough if we want to save the coral reefs that are so necessary in the overall health of the oceans. Only if we look to drastically and speedily halt
Charles Darwin was right, again, but this time his predictions focused on a somewhat different genre than we normally associate with the man; this time, it’s the ocean. Researchers have found that Darwin may in fact have been right on the money when he labelled the Eastern Pacific Barrier (EPB) “impassable” in the 1880s. The
In the constant interplay between Humans and Nature, everything is a trade-off. As our scientists begin to consider an intervention approach to climate change and conducting large-scale experiments, this trade-off is coming into sharper resolution. Case in point: iron ocean fertilization (or “seeding”), a geoengineering strategy making the news in recent years. Iron fertilization also
I just wrote a few weeks ago on the possibility of coral reefs getting completely wiped out by 2100. Now, a couple recent research articles document the extensive damage to coral reefs around the world in 2010 alone, and it is pretty bad (understatement). Coral Bleaching in Caribbean Eli Kintisch of ScienceNOW writes: Scientists studying
A group of 30 leading Earth and Environmental scientists is proposing “nine planetary boundaries”, or “safety zones”, that must not be crossed, in order to preserve the planetary and environmental balance that human civilizations (and much of the rest of the biosphere) require. Crossing these boundaries–and three of them may have already been crossed–could “generate unacceptable environmental change for humanity.”
The beautiful parrotfish (family Scaridae) performs many roles in coral reef ecosystems. With their large teeth they munch algae off the coral so that it stays healthy and alive. Parrotfish are constantly eating and digesting bits of coral whole, and excreting sand that helps create beaches. Since parrotfish spend all day searching the reef for food to
Leading experts at the 2009 Aspen Environment Forum called ocean acidification caused by high levels of CO2 emissions a “planet changer”, and predicted that all coral in the ocean would be in danger of dying off by mid-century if we continued to burn fossil fuel at our current rate. Ken Caldeira of Carnegie Institution, Martin
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting severe bleaching for parts of the Coral Sea, near Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, and the Coral Triangle, causing immense damage to an important global marine environment over the next few months. [social_buttons] “This forecast bleaching episode will be caused by increased water temperatures and is
The loss of coral reefs around the world is being blamed on the mass amounts of CO2 in our planets oceans, and the resulting acid that is keeping the reefs and other crustaceans from calcifying.
