The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Ocean ecosystems play a critical role in the Earth's carbon cycle and the quantification of their impacts for both present conditions and for predictions into the future remains one of the greatest challenges in oceanography. The goal of the EXport Processes in the Ocean from Remote Sensing (EXPORTS) Science Plan …
Sandy beaches are being threatened by a changing climate. However, the effects of this changing environment, including warming, on these ecosystems, have hitherto been tentative and qualitative. Using concurrent long-term (1984−2007) observations on abundance and individual size, together with laboratory examinations of body abnormalities (morphological anomalies and epibionts), we provide …
Thousands of shipwrecks spanning more than 500 years of marine history are being used to better understand the health of deep-ocean eco-systems. An international team of scientists initially set out to investigate the effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, which saw more than …
We present the first, to our knowledge, estimate of global sea-level (GSL) change over the last ∼3,000 years that is based upon statistical synthesis of a global database of regional sea-level reconstructions. GSL varied by ∼±8 cm over the pre-Industrial Common Era, with a notable decline over 1000–1400 CE coinciding …
A time series of organic carbon export from Gulf of Maine (GoM) watersheds was compared to a time series of biological, chemical, bio-optical, and hydrographic properties, measured across the GoM between Yarmouth, NS, Canada, and Portland, ME, U.S. Optical proxies were used to quantify the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and …
The end-Permian mass extinction not only decimated taxonomic diversity but also disrupted the functioning of global ecosystems and the stability of biogeochemical cycles. Explaining the 5-million-year delay between the mass extinction and Earth system recovery remains a fundamental challenge in both the Earth and biological sciences. We use coupled records …
Large freshwater lakes formed in North America and Europe during deglaciation following the Last Glacial Maximum. Rapid drainage of these lakes into the Oceans resulted in abrupt perturbations in climate, including the Younger Dryas and 8.2 kyr cooling events. In the mid-latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere major glacial lakes also …
A reconstruction of changes in ocean oxygenation throughout the last glacial cycle shows that respired carbon was removed from the deep Southern Ocean during deglaciation and Antarctic warm events, consistent with a prominent role of reduced iron fertilization and enhanced ocean ventilation, modifying atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the past …
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) approaches are efforts to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Here we use a marine carbon cycle model to investigate the effects of one CDR technique: the open ocean dissolution of the iron-containing mineral olivine. We analyse the maximum CDR potential of an annual dissolution of 3 …
Countries export much of the harm created by their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions because the Earth’s atmosphere intermixes globally. Yet, the extent to which this leads to inequity between GHG emitters and those impacted by the resulting climate change depends on the distribution of climate vulnerability. Here, we determine empirically …
Human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are causing the Earth to warm. We know this, and we have known about the heat-trapping nature of these gases for over 100 years. But scientists want to know how fast the Earth is warming and how much extra energy is …
Among the tropical oceans, the western Indian Ocean hosts one of the largest concentrations of marine phytoplankton blooms in summer. Interestingly, this is also the region with the largest warming trend in sea surface temperatures in the tropics during the past century—although the contribution of such a large warming to …
Core isotope measurements in the equatorial Pacific Ocean reveal that although atmospheric dust deposition during the last ice age was higher than today’s, the productivity of the equatorial Pacific Ocean did not increase; this may have been because iron-enabled greater nutrient consumption, mainly in the Southern Ocean, reduced the nutrients …
This study unravels the physical link between the weakening of the monsoon circulation and the decreasing trend in the frequency of monsoon depressions over the Bay of Bengal. Based on the analysis of the terms of Genesis Potential Index, an empirical index to quantify the relative contribution of large scale …
Data-based projections suggest that the natural CO2 cycle could be amplified by up to ten times by 2100 in some oceanic regions if atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to increase, which could detrimentally affect major fisheries.
As long as global CO2 emissions continue to increase annually, long-term committed Earth system changes grow much faster than current observations. A novel metric linking this future growth to policy decisions today is the mitigation delay sensitivity (MDS), but MDS estimates for Earth system variables other than peak temperature (ΔT …
UNSW's Ben McNeil and Tristan Sasse explain how a rise in the oceans' CO2 levels could have huge implications for global fisheries and marine ecosystems. Ocean fish around the world risk becoming lost at sea if carbon dioxide concentrations in seawater continue to rise on current trajectories, a study from …
It’s official: 2015 was the hottest year on record. Global data show that a powerful El Niño, marked by warmer waters in the tropical Pacific Ocean, helped to drive atmospheric temperatures well past 2014's record highs. Some researchers suggest that broader Pacific trends could spell even more dramatic temperature increases …
Researchers reconstruct the evolution of ocean acidification in the California Current System (CalCS) from 1979 through 2012 using hindcast simulations with an eddy-resolving ocean biogeochemical model forced with observation-based variations of wind and fluxes of heat and freshwater. Researchers find that domain-wide pH and ${{\rm{\Omega }}}_{\mathrm{arag}}$ in the top 60 …
The amount of heat soaked up by the oceans has surged in the past two decades in a sign of worsening global warming despite a slowdown in temperature rises at the Earth's surface, a U.S. study showed on Monday. The trend of warmer oceans, blamed on man-made emissions of greenhouse …
