Category News

In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, many people are dreaming of Florida as a retreat from long days of self-isolation. Hundreds of miles of beautiful beaches, azure skies, shimmering oceans, teeming wilderness including barrier reefs and the Everglades, and strands of picturesque keys and islets. But this paradise is staring down a menace of its own — a rising sea level — and it’s time for a paradigm shift to help us save the Sunshine State. How that battle plays out will have huge implications for other coastal regions across the rest of the United States.

Floridians are experiencing the undeniable impacts of sea level rise firsthand on a daily basis. For Florida’s environment, the signs of danger and damage are everywhere. Saltwater is inundating the Florida Bay, exacerbating an...

The Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its most widespread coral bleaching event, according to scientists who say record warm temperatures and warming oceans are threatening its fragile corals. The entire Great Barrier Reef and some of its surrounding areas are facing an unprecedented period of heat stress in what is the third major bleaching event in only the past five years. Heat-induced bleaching can occur periodically, but scientists say climate change is causing the destructive events to happen more frequently, which is particularly troubling because corals don’t have enough time to recover and grow back.

The reef’s last major bleaching event occurred in 2017, and scientists weren’t expecting another one so soon, said Mark Eakin, coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad...

Climate change is threatening the world’s coral reefs, and saving them all will prove impossible. A team from EPFL has developed a method for identifying corals with the greatest adaptive potential to heat stress. The research, published in the journal Evolutionary Applications, should support improved and better-targeted marine biodiversity conservation strategies.

Ecosystems in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica face growing threats from climate change and fishing pressure, but identifying areas in need of protection is challenging. A paper published March 18 in Nature (together with a companion data paper in the journal Scientific Data) describes a novel solution to this problem, using electronic tracking data from birds and marine mammals.

“We identified common areas used by multiple species, which allowed us for the first time to evaluate how well Marine Protected Areas are serving the entire community of species in the Southern Ocean,” said coauthor Luis Huckstadt, an assistant researcher in the Institute of Marine Sciences (IMS) at UC Santa Cruz.

Animals go to places where they find food, so identifying areas of the Southern Ocean where pred...

We know this can happen because such changes have already been widely observed. But our research, now published in the journal Nature Communications, shows that the size of the ecosystem is important. Once a “tipping point” is triggered, large ecosystems could collapse much faster than we had thought possible. It’s a finding that has worrying implications for the functioning of our planet.

We started off by wondering how the size of the ecosystem might affect the time taken for these changes (ecologists call them “regime shifts”) to happen. It seems intuitive to expect large ecosystems to shift more slowly than small ones. If so, would the relationship between shift time and size be the same for lakes, corals, fisheries, and forests?

We began by analyzing data for about 40 regime...

The amount of plastic pollution in the oceans is rapidly increasing. This is problematic, as at least 700 species of marine animals – including sharks, whales, seabirds and turtles – can become entangled in the stuff or mistake it for a tasty snack.

While we know that some species seem to eat plastic because it looks like jellyfish or some other food source, less research has been carried out into what plastic smells like to marine animals.

But now, a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found that the coating of algae and microbes that naturally builds up on ocean plastics causes the rubbish to give off the aroma of food.

The researchers took 15 captive-reared loggerhead turtles, each around five months old, and placed them in a laboratory aquarium...

A cyclone in the Coral Sea has helped to ease widespread coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, an expert said, after the marine park weathered its hottest month of sea temperatures on record.

The BOM forecast a tropical cyclone would form off the north Queensland coast over the weekend, and that severe weather over the central and north Queensland coasts would ease.

“The (sea) temperatures have dropped quite suddenly because of this weather system,” said Professor Terry Hughes from the ARC Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

The cooler change comes at a critical time for the health of the reef.

Figures produced by the BOM showed sea surface temperatures in the marine park in February were hotter than in any month since 1900 — and hotter even than during the record bleaching e...

Earth’s great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions. A comprehensive review of satellite data acquired at both poles is unequivocal in its assessment of accelerating trends, say scientists.

Between them, Greenland and Antarctica lost 6.4 trillion tonnes of ice in the period from 1992 to 2017.

This was sufficient to push up global sea-levels by 17.8mm.

“That’s not a good news story,” said Prof Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds in the UK.

“Today, the ice sheets contribute about a third of all sea-level rise, whereas in the 1990s, their contribution was actually pretty small at about 5%. This has important implications for the future, for coastal flooding and erosion,” he told BBC News.

T...

The UN has postponed deadlocked talks on a global treaty to protect marine biodiversity in the high seas because of the coronavirus, giving countries extra time to seek compromise. Governments had been due to agree a global treaty in April to safeguard life in seas beyond the national jurisdiction of coastal states, a poorly regulated region accounting for two-thirds of the global ocean. Over-fishing, shipping, plastic pollution and the potential of seabed mining are among the threats already affecting marine ecosystems. Meanwhile, climate impacts such as warming waters, rising acidity and shifting current patterns are also undermining the resilience of marine biodiversity.

A resolution adopted by consensus by the plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday agreed to postpon...

A million seagrass seeds are being planted as part of Britain’s largest project to save the “wonder plant”. Experts say seagrass helps tackle the effects of climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide faster than trees. But up to 92% of the plant may have disappeared from the UK’s coast over the last century, research has found.

Work has now started on lowering the seeds onto the seabed off Pembrokeshire to create a new 20,000 sq m (215,280 sq ft) meadow.

Scientists hope it will also help boost fish numbers and support marine wildlife.

Seagrass, which is found in shallow waters of coastal regions, has been declining globally at a rate of about 7% a year since 1990.

That is a result of long-term development of our coastlines and pollution of the sea, according to project leader Dr Richard ...