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 …
Marine plastic pollution is an ever-increasing problem that demands immediate mitigation and reduction plans. Here, a model based on satellite-tracked buoy observations and scaled to a large data set of observations on microplastic from surface trawls was used to simulate the transport of plastics floating on the ocean surface from …
Marine sediments from the North Pacific document two episodes of expansion and strengthening of the subsurface oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) accompanied by seafloor hypoxia during the last deglacial transition. The mechanisms driving this hypoxia remain under debate. We present a new high-resolution alkenone palaeotemperature reconstruction from the Gulf of Alaska …
The El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences global climate as well as extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and tropical cyclones, leading to large societal impacts globally have shown that El Niño—the warm phase of ENSO—effectively discharges oceanic heat into the central to eastern North Pacific basin through the subsurface …
Global projections of intense tropical cyclone activity are derived from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) High Resolution Atmospheric Model (HiRAM; 50-km grid) and the GFDL hurricane model using a two-stage downscaling procedure. First, tropical cyclone genesis is simulated globally using HiRAM. Each storm is then downscaled into the GFDL …
The warming of the oceans due to climate change is now unstoppable after record temperatures last year, bringing additional sea-level rise, and raising the risks of severe storms, US government climate scientists said on Thursday. The annual State of the Climate in 2014 report, based on research from 413 scientists …
Coral reefs are essential to ocean health, but dangerous coral bleaching is occurring more often and more widely due to warmer water, scientists report Abnormally warm ocean temperatures are creating conditions that threaten to kill coral in the equatorial Pacific, north Pacific and western Atlantic oceans, the National Oceanic and …
In order to characterize the long-term trend of remote marine aerosols, a 12-year observation was conducted for water-soluble ions in TSP (total suspended particulate) aerosols collected from 2001 to 2012 in the Asian outflow region at Chichijima Island in the western North Pacific. We found a clear difference in chemical …
Movement of nutrients across ecosystem boundaries can have important effects on food webs and population dynamics. An example from the North Pacific Rim is the connection between productive marine ecosystems and freshwaters driven by annual spawning migrations of Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus spp). While a growing body of research has highlighted …
The continental shelves of the Pacific-Arctic Region (PAR) are especially vulnerable to the effects of ocean acidification (OA) because the intrusion of anthropogenic CO2 is not the only process that can reduce pH and carbonate mineral saturation states for aragonite. Enhanced sea ice melt, respiration of organic matter, upwelling, and …
Dominant climatic factors controlling the lifetime peak intensity of typhoons are determined from six decades of Pacific typhoon data. We find that upper ocean temperatures in the low-latitude northwestern Pacific (LLNWP) and sea surface temperatures in the central equatorial Pacific control the seasonal average lifetime peak intensity by setting the …
Typhoons (tropical cyclones) severely impact the half-billion population of the Asian Pacific. Intriguingly, during the recent decade, typhoon destructive potential (Power Dissipation Index, PDI) has decreased considerably (by B35%). This decrease, paradoxically, has occurred despite the increase in typhoon intensity and ocean warming. Using the method proposed by Emanuel (in …
THE “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” lies off the coast of California. But it is not the only place where a system of rotating ocean currents, known as gyres, concentrate floating material, particularly plastic detritus dumped into the sea or washed out from rivers. There is an awful lot of it: …
The Hawaiian Islands' location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is threatened by tsunamis from great earthquakes in nearly all directions. Historical great earthquakes Mw > 8.5 in the last 100 years have produced large inundations and loss of life in the islands but cannot account for a substantial …
Blue whales were targeted in the North Pacific from 1905–1971 and are listed as endangered by the IUCN. Despite decades without whaling, abundance estimates for eastern North Pacific (ENP) blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) suggest little evidence for a recent increase. One possible reason is fatal strikes by large ships, which …
The world's leading expert on the poisoning of the oceans has described how he was "utterly shocked" by the true amount of plastic floating on the sea, warning that it potentially posed a bigger threat to the planet than climate change. Charles J Moore, a captain in the US Merchant …
A commonly held belief that global warming will diminish oxygen concentrations in the ocean looks like it may not be entirely true. According to new research published in Science magazine, just the opposite is likely the case in the northern Pacific Ocean, with its anoxic zone expected to shrink in …
Increasing levels of air pollutants in Asia have recently drawn considerable attention, but the effects of Asian pollution outflows on regional climate and global atmospheric circulation remain to be quantified. Using a multiscale global aerosol–climate model (GCM), we demonstrate long-range transport of the Asian pollution, large resulting variations in the …
Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this slowdown in surface warming. A key component of the global hiatus that has been identified is cool …
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) drives substantial variability in rainfall, severe weather, agricultural production, ecosystems and disease in many parts of the world. Given that further human-forced changes in the Earth’s climate system seem inevitable, the possibility exists that the character of ENSO and its impacts might change over the …
