Ocean Sentry
The world’s oceans have lost more than two per cent of their oxygen since 1960, with potentially devastating consequences for sea plants and animals, marine scientists said Wednesday. In those five and a half decades, parts of the oceans devoid of oxygen, called anoxic waters, have quadrupled, said a study in …
February, 2017
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15 February
The Arctic permafrost is starting to thaw and that is very, very bad news
The Arctic permafrost is starting to thaw, releasing the ground from the frozen state it has been in for thousands of years. At present, permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere covers an area spanning some 20 million square kilometres and is home to tens of millions of people. Regions covered include …
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14 February
Litter levels in the depths of the Arctic are on the rise
The Arctic has a serious litter problem: in just ten years, the concentration of marine litter at a deep-sea station in the Arctic Ocean has risen 20-fold. This was recently reported in a study by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI)…
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14 February
Plankton species at risk from climate change
A significant study involving the University of Newcastle (UON) has revealed certain species of plankton have moved substantially and depleted in number over the past six decades due to rising sea temperatures, causing serious concern for the marine ecosystem…
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14 February
The looming extinction of the Maui dolphin
Like Mexico’s embattled vaquita porpoise, another marine mammal on the other side of the Pacific Ocean may be making its last stand. The Maui’s dolphin, the world’s smallest and rarest dolphin, which lives off the west coast of New Zealand’s North Island, is down to about 60 individuals, from 2000 …
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14 February
‘Extraordinary’ levels of toxic pollution found in Mariana Trench, deepest place on the planet
Scientists have discovered “extraordinary” levels of toxic pollution in the most remote and inaccessible place on the planet – the 10km-deep Mariana Trench in the Pacific ocean. Small crustaceans that live in the pitch-black waters of the trench, captured by a robotic submarine, were contaminated with 50 times more toxic chemicals …
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13 February
Warming oceans are wrecking seabird populations
A year after tens of thousands of common murres, an abundant North Pacific seabird, starved and washed ashore on beaches from California to Alaska, researchers have pinned the cause to unusually warm ocean temperatures that affected the tiny fish they eat…
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13 February
Humans causing climate to change 170 times faster than natural forces
For the first time, researchers have developed a mathematical equation to describe the impact of human activity on the earth, finding people are causing the climate to change 170 times faster than natural forces…
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10 February
Climate change and fishing create ‘trap’ for penguins
As the climate changes and fisheries transform the oceans, the world’s African penguins are in trouble, according to researchers reporting in Current Biology on February 9. Young penguins aren’t able to take all the changes into account and are finding themselves “trapped” in parts of the sea that can no …
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8 February
Scientists categorize Earth as a ‘toxic planet’
Humans emit more than 250 billion tonnes of chemical substances a year, in a toxic avalanche that is harming people and life everywhere on the planet. “Earth, and all life on it, are being saturated with man-made chemicals in an event unlike anything in the planet’s entire history,” says Julian Cribb, …
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5 February
Great Barrier Reef building coral under threat from poisonous seaweed
The Griffith University study, conducted in collaboration with national and international experts in reef and chemical ecology, showed that if the world continues with ‘business as usual’ CO2 emissions important reef building corals will suffer significantly by 2050 and die off by 2100….
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3 February
Whole families of rays are being killed for a ‘contest’
Hunters, armed with bows and arrows, board boats and shoot the rays in the water — all for a contest called the Battle of the Rays. Those who don’t die instantly are clubbed in the head…