“Deep. Dangerous. Determined.” And now we all have a chance to go along. Today DEEPSEA CHALLENGE 3D opens—-the film in which James Cameron dives to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of Earth’s oceans. “I’ve seen some pretty astonishing things in the depths,” says James Cameron of his dives to the
Bad news from the annual American Geophysical Union’s Ocean Sciences Meeting in Honolulu. Researchers there announced today that radioactive isotopes from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, when three reactors melted down after the March 11, 2011, Tohoku earthquake and subsequent mega-tsunami, have finally reached the West Coast. John Smith, a research scientist at Canada’s Bedford Institute
Preparing to decommission the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, TEPCO recently dismantled the damaged roof parapet of Unit 4 and removed debris there. (Screenshot source: Enformable.com/Lucas W. Hixson.) As early as next Friday (November 8), the scariest decommissioning work at the ruined nuclear power complex may begin. Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO), the largest electrical utility in
The El Niño climatic event has long been a driving factor in the way of life of the average Australian, especially if you live away from the city. Dry conditions spread across much of the country, and increase the likelihood of extreme bushfires. Now, a new study has found that any “flavour” of El Niño can
A pair of scientists who were working to determine how climate change would affect central equatorial Pacific reefs have discovered that some Pacific islands within two degrees north and south of the equator may become isolated climate change refuges for corals and fish. “The finding that there may be refuges in the tropics where
La Niña conditions have re-emerged in the tropical Pacific Ocean since August 2011 but are weaker than the previous episode. However, this La Niña episode is expected to strengthen slightly over the coming year, and is likely to persist through to the end of this year and into early 2012, possibly reverting to a neutral
Rising from the depths of the North Pacific lies a fabled island, now submerged just 15 feet below the surface of the ocean. Rumors and warnings about Cortes Bank abound, but among big wave surfers, this legendary rock is famous for one simple (and massive) reason: this is the home of the biggest rideable wave
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released its yearly Winter Outlook which tells of a second winter in a row which will be affected by La Niña which will bring continued drier and warmer than average weather in the Southern Plains and colder and wetter conditions in the Pacific Northwest.
A new study has found that the Northeast Pacific was not an important reservoir for the carbon that is believed to be responsible for the end of the last Ice Age, throwing scientists back to the proverbial drawing board as they digest this shift in their theories.
August was a month of extremes across the whole of our planet, with tornadoes, droughts and La Niña conditions reemerging despite having only disappeared a few months earlier. For a picture of much of what happened across the planet this past August, browse the image below provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2011’s August was the eighth warmest since record keeping began back in 1880 and the period of June to August was the seventh warmest such period as well.
As climate experts had already predicted, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has announced that La Niña – which was the cause behind so much of the extreme weather towards the end of 2010 and into 2011 – has re-emerged in the Pacific Ocean and is expected to gradually strengthen and continue into the Northern Hemisphere’s winter.
Many of the leading climate services are predicting that La Niña return this winter, after a brief hiatus.
Check out this super cool infographic from ReuseThisBag… which, believe it or not, sells Reusable Shopping Bags. As we’ve written a number of times before, there are huge garbage patches, mostly of plastic, in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean (and other oceans).
Click the image to enlarge it.
Planet Earth suffered its seventh warmest July since record keeping began back in 1880, and July’s Arctic sea ice extent was the smallest on record since records began in 1979.
The first estimate of the amount of radiation that leaked from the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant in the wake of the devastating tsunami have been released by atmospheric chemists from the University of California, Sa Diego.
East Africa suffers regularly at the hands of faraway climatic events such as the warm El Niño or the cool La Niña phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Now, scientists know that the waxing and waning of floods and droughts in the region at the hands of ENSO has been a regular feature dating back 20,000 years.
NASA’s GOES013 satellite captured this image July 22 at 0845 UTC (4:45 a.m. EDT) of three separate tropical cyclones; Bret and Cindy trundling through the North Atlantic in the right of the image, and Hurricane Dora over in the eastern Pacific.
New research conducted by a group of graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego has found that at least nine percent of fish found in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch located in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre contain plastic in their stomachs.
Planet Earth suffered one of the warmest years on record, according to the 2010 State of the Climate Report which was published today.
Want an explanation for the record snowfalls, killer tornadoes and devastating floods running wild across America? NASA climatologist Bill Patzert believes that “La Nada” is the problem.
In early June the Chilean Volcano called Puyehue-Cordón Caulle erupted, sending a massive plume of ash around the Southern Hemisphere, stalling flights out of many airports and causing havoc for millions of passengers. NASA Satellite imagery captured the plume as it made its way around the world.
Paolo Nespoli, a European Space Agency Astronaut and Flight Engineer of ISS Expedition 26/27 which extended from December 2010 to May 2011 took the following photo before leaving the International Space Station for home, at the end of his 6 month stay.
Climate extremes similar to what was seen in 2010’s Pakistani flooding and 2011’s Australian flooding are likely to continue as the world gets warmer, say scientists behind a new report.
The World Meteorological Organisation, the weather agency of the United Nations, has announced that the current La Niña episode looks to be coming to an end.
America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center has predicted a below average pacific hurricane season, with an outlook that calls for a 70% probability of a below average season.
This photo of the Kamchatka Peninsula of Russia, highlighting the volcanoes Avachinsky and Kozelsky, was taken by a member of the Expedition 27 crew on board the International Space Station.
An international team of climate scientists from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa have found that tree ring data, specifically from the US Southwest, agree well with the 150-year instrumental sea surface temperature records in the tropical Pacific that we already have of El Niño events.
Following some strange migratory pattern of its own design, and emitting a plaintive call-song that is never answered, a solitary whale roams the depths of the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The call-song has been tracked through NOAA’s underwater, sound surveillance system since 1989, when a research team out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute noticed “whale-like” sounds occurring in the 51.75 Hertz band of the radio spectrum. Amongst the scientists who have faithfully tracked the song since, the mystery whale is known as ’52 Hertz’, but popularly, “she” is known as Alice.
Most people will have seen the images depicting the devastating impact of the 9.0 Tohoku Earthquake which destroyed coastal towns along the Japanese east coast near Sendai. Entire villages and communities are gone, along with the lives that inhabited them.
Of less, but still important, concern than the lives lost, is what will happen to all the debris which was washed out to sea as a result of the tsunami.
Projections of just what will happen to the debris have been made by Nikolai Maximenko and Jan Hafner at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa’s International Pacific Research Center, shown in the animated image below
Average winter temperatures in northern Europe are at least 10 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than similar latitudes on the northeastern coast of the United States and the eastern coast of Canada. The same phenomenon happens over the Pacific Ocean, with winters on the northeastern coast of Asia being regularly colder than in the same latitude in the Pacific Northwest.
And the culprit for these cooler winters, is warm waters.
Over the last decade, geologists have speculated that based on certain evidence in the surrounding environment, these undersea volcanoes are capable of explosive eruptions. No one’s been able to prove it though. Until now.
Following the devastating earthquake which struck Japan and the resulting tsunami, flood waters have submerged crop lands and settlements along the affected east coast.
One of Indonesia’s most active volcano’s has erupted, sending lava and searing gas clouds tumbling down its slopes.
My home is Australia, and I woke up this morning to hear that 8 people were dead and another 72 currently missing, with the death toll expected to rise, as floodwaters sweep through the north of our country. “There’s no doubt that we are now in a very different sort of disaster,” said Australian prime
From 1946 to 1958, the Bikini Atoll–a Micronesian, volcanic island group in the Pacific Ocean (part of the Marshall Islands)–was “home” to twenty three, U.S.-conducted, nuclear detonations, including the first true Hydrogen bomb test, in 1954. This latter detonation produced an explosion far more powerful than originally predicted and caused wide-spread contamination from radioactive fallout.
The NASA/Global Hawk team, lead by Chris Naftel at the Dryden Research Center (Edwards Air Force base), is preparing for an important remote monitoring mission called the Global Hawk Pacific campaign, or GloPac, which will be comprised of four to five separate flights over the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic.
