Oceanography

You’ve probably heard it a few times: the climate is indeed warming up, but it’s all good, because the rate at which it is warming up is slowing down. But a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters analyzing ocean warming (which represents 90% of global warming) claims otherwise. Accelerating global warming Contrary to the [...]

NASA has, for the first time, released a global map of ocean salinity. The first thing that popped up for me was the pulse of freshwater gushing from the Amazon, but other major features are worth noticing. An invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal and [...]

Every bottlenose dolphin makes its own distinctive sound, a high-pitched “eeee” through which they announce their presence. However, dolphins are also great at mimicking sounds, being able to copy even intricate computer generated sounds; this made researchers curious to see if dolphins can in fact mimic each other’s sound, and how they use this ability [...]

Why would the El Niño be important for the rest of us that don’t live in the western part of South America? Well because it also influences the climate in North America, Asia, Australia, Africa, even Europe perhaps.. so that basically means the whole world. The El Niño-the southern oscillation or ENSO is a sort of a [...]

Who doesn’t dream of a deserted tropical island..sandy beaches made of coral sand, with crystal clear water, blue like the sky – you know what I mean. And let’s say it would be somewhere off the coast of Australia, maybe near New Calledonia. That sounds perfect.. it’s a great place, a great place to imagine. Well, [...]

The world’s oceans are teeming with life, a new census estimating almost 1 million species out there; but marine life is declining, with the main causes being overfishing, ocean acidification and coastal damage. Avoiding a crisis The new numbers are just estimates, but they are much lower than previous studies, which put the number of [...]

The natural world sometimes has a magnificent way of dealing with its own problems – and this is exactly the case here. Coral threatened by toxic seaweeds emit a chemical signal which draws fish to eat away the danger. When Acropora nasuta corals come into contact with the toxic seaweed Chlorodesmis fastigiata, they scream for [...]

Hyderabad (South India): Man is the maker of his own destiny, say elders. The latest scientific studies on oceans endorse this adage. Be it  severe cyclonic storms, significant rainfall reductions, crop damages, mass mortalities and melting of Himalayan glaciers – all these could be prevented, if not minimized to a large extent, if we adopt [...]

It’s amazing the kind of emotions and entertainment a good lights show can provide. Manipulation of optical phenomena has  been employed by artists since the invention of the first mirror, however a really dazzling display can be quite rare. Just recently, I managed to come across one of the most amazing display of art I’ve [...]

Deep in the Mariana Trench, about seven miles below the surface, researchers found huge single celled amoebas, making them not only completely surprisng and amazing, but also the creatures living at the biggest depth found so far. The team from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego studied and catalogued these xenophyophores, single-celled animals [...]