Ocean Sentry
It was 28.9 degrees Celsius near the Arctic Ocean this weekend as carbon dioxide hit its highest level in human history.
May, 2019
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15 May
Greece urged to protect Hellenic Trench from seismic blasts
One hundred scientists and scientific, conservation, and campaign organizations, including NRDC, have called on the Prime Minister of Greece for immediate and full protection of the Hellenic Trench from offshore hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation.
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14 May
It’s not just fish, plastic pollution harms the bacteria that help us breathe
Ten per cent of the oxygen we breathe comes from just one kind of bacteria in the ocean. Now laboratory tests have shown that these bacteria are susceptible to plastic pollution, according to a study published in Communications Biology.
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14 May
Scientists are warning that we absolutely must not farm octopuses
Octopuses, scientists have argued in a new essay, should never be farmed – not just because of their intelligence, but because of the environmental impacts such farms would create.
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13 May
It’s official: Atmospheric CO2 just exceeded 415 ppm for the first time in human history
Yet another alarming milestone of humanity’s damaging effect on the environment has now officially been reached – crossing a barrier into a hot, polluted future like the planet hasn’t witnessed in millions of years.
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13 May
Mangrove forests trap floating litter
Mangrove forests on the coasts of Saudi Arabia act as litter traps, accumulating plastic debris from the marine environment, according to new research from KAUST.
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13 May
The disturbing story behind this seemingly innocent image
At first glance, it appears to be an innocuous photo of dozens of pieces of plastic neatly aligned on a tray. Accompanying the image was another photo of himself removing the plastics from a dead seabird, just three months old.
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13 May
Radioactive carbon from nuclear bomb tests found in deep ocean trenches
Radioactive carbon released into the atmosphere from 20th-century nuclear bomb tests has reached the deepest parts of the ocean, a new study finds. Crustaceans in deep ocean trenches have incorporated this ‘bomb carbon’ into the molecules that make up their bodies.
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10 May
Deep sea carbon reservoirs once superheated the Earth – could it happen again?
Climate scientists now consider the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a major global warming event that occurred about 55 million years ago, to be an analog for environmental changes taking place today. The PETM happened over a longer period and without human involvement, but it shows that there is inherent instability in the …
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10 May
A warmer Arctic will have a large and complex impact to algal production
Since the Arctic marine food web is short, poorly diverse and seasonally driven by limited pulses of energy, the expected changes in primary production can have relevant impacts to the rest of the food web up to humans.
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9 May
Low oxygen levels could temporarily blind marine invertebrates
These results, published recently in the Journal of Experimental Biology, are the first demonstration that vision in marine invertebrates is highly sensitive to the amount of available oxygen in the water.
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8 May
Microplastics flowing into our oceans threaten deep sea marine life
Researchers from The University of Manchester and the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) are racing to understand how microplastics are transported to the deep-sea floor in an effort to combat the growing ecological problem.