JAKARTA — Every morning, sisters Janah and Jaroh rise early on the diminishing coastline of Indonesia’s capital city and pray for calm weather and good fortune. At around 9 a.m.,…
Andres Peña Castro and his team didn’t set out to track sea ice. Their original plan was to quantify the interactions between ocean, earth and atmosphere to be able to…
Riding his bike to work in the Netherlands’ Zeeland province, Tjeerd Bouma passed fields of pear and apple trees. His mind wandered. As a coastal ecologist at the Royal Netherlands…
As climate change raises global sea temperatures, coral bleaching events are becoming more frequent and intense around the world. Yet researchers say some coral reefs may have found a way…
EBRO DELTA, Spain — Perched on an oyster and mussel farming platform in the middle of Fangar Bay, Vacile Cotirlet works with the assured movements that come with two decades…
Scientists have discovered that soft, branching corals deep in the Mediterranean Sea have remained unharmed by heat stress. In contrast, the corals in shallow waters have noticeably suffered as temperatures…
The south polar region long seemed resistant to climate change, but as warming intensifies, impacts are being identified across the region. While signs of an irreversible tipping point are lacking, Antarctic changes will likely affect the rest of the world.
A population of bowhead whales living in the western Arctic has long followed the same migration patterns. But new research suggests that climate change and the subsequent melting of sea…
Farah Obaidullah’s life has pivoted around the ocean. Growing up in Gabon and the Netherlands, she spent as much time as possible in or near the water, snorkeling, rescuing marine…
New research finds that a record Arctic sea ice melt season in 2007 initiated a “regime shift” to thinner, more transient ice that may be “irreversible”; another study shows that atmospheric rivers from the south are warming the Arctic in winter.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A misty rain blows against my face as I follow Farah Obaidullah along Scheveningen Beach in the northwest part of The Hague. Despite the wind and…
As mass coral bleaching events grow in frequency and intensity, scientists are finding out more about how corals, which make up the physical foundation of reefs, respond during times of…
Machine learning can help conservationists monitor climate impacts across large swaths of marine ecosystems over extended periods of time, a task never possible before. The Delta Maps machine learning tool…
Scientists remember the years between 2014 and 2017 as a particularly bad time for coral reefs. Elevated temperatures fueled by an El Niño climate pattern harmed about three-quarters of the…
Imagine showers of little green sand grains drifting through the ocean: collecting on coral reefs, rolling off the backs of whales, sprinkling schools of tuna — and helping to save…
HONG KONG — Thousands of grayish, oval-shaped oysters pepper the mudflats of far northern Hong Kong, clustering together on fragments of rock lining the shoreline or clamping onto abandoned concrete…
1. Negotiations for historic global plastics treaty break ground Global leaders cheered to the strike of a recycled-plastic gavel in March, signifying a landmark decision by the United Nations Environment…
A stone causeway connects an islet, the famed Aragonese Castle perched atop it, to the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples in southern Italy. Below water, along the…
On a Russian-led expedition in the northern Pacific Ocean in the 1740s, German botanist Georg Wilhelm Steller laid eyes on a species that captured his imagination. It looked like a…
BONTHE, Sierra Leone — As the sun rises over Bonthe, a small city on the coastline of Sierra Leone’s remote Sherbro Island, echoes of a not-so-distant colonial past bathe in…
Melting sea ice may evoke images of polar bears stranded on shrinking floes or dramatically collapsing ice shelves. But according to a study published recently in the journal Science, ice…
As Arctic sea ice begins melting out fully in summer, the frequency of strong El Niños could increase by 35% by century's end, causing extreme weather events to increase, says recent modeling study.
Sea turtles lumber from ocean to shore to lay their eggs in the sand. In some places, this effort is protected by humans who patrol beaches on foot, warding off…
The idea is simple but ambitious: protect the ocean by giving it the same kind of rights a person might have. No such legal mechanism is currently in place, but…
In April 2009, ocean explorer Enric Sala and a team of marine biologists dove into the waters around the southern Line Islands, an uninhabited archipelago in the central Pacific that…
Unstudied at sea until recently, this huge, fast-moving ocean current may hold a key to resolving climate change uncertainties. But doing remote research in southern oceans poses financial, data gathering, and unexpected challenges.
Heat waves are reshaping life in the Mediterranean, with few of the sea’s coves, bays and shorelines untouched, according to a recent study looking at the impact of marine heat…
A new study conveys a dire warning for the future: multiple tipping points could be triggered if global warming exceeds the critical threshold of 1.5°C. Published this week in Science,…
Balintang, PHILIPPINES — “Seaweeds are important to me because they give me joy when we plant them,” says Melinda Gimotea, as she crouches down among the pile of seaweed seedlings…
MEDAN, Indonesia — On a recent morning in Kampung Nelayan, a village on the northeastern coast of the island of Sumatra, fisherman Heri Gunawan returned home frustrated and dissatisfied. Heri…
