Marine scientists led by Dr. Lothar Stramma from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel, Germany say they have made an alarming new discovery - in some regions of the world oceans, oxygen essential for marine organisms is declining.

The new study documents that the oxygen values in tropical oceans at a depth of 300 to 700 meters have declined during the past 50 years. As large marine organisms can either no longer exist in these areas or they would avoid them, the expanding oxygen minimum zones may have substantial biological and economical consequences.

The oxygen distribution in the ocean is not homogenous. At the eastern boundaries of the tropical oceans at depths between 200 and 800 metres, there are areas with reduced oxygen, the so-called oxygen minimum zones (OMZ). Rising CO2 levels are causing a temperature increase of the ocean and a general decline of oxygen solubility in the water.

Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered a new climate pattern called the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation.

This new pattern explains changes in the water that are important in helping commercial fishermen understand fluctuations in the fish stock. They also believe that as the temperature of the Earth warms, large fluctuations in these factors could help climatologists predict how the oceans will respond in a warmer world.

“We’ve been able to explain, for the first time, the changes in salinity, nutrients and chlorophyll that we see in the Northeast Pacific,” said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

While the recent Arctic summer was the warmest on record satellite images from the Antarctic summer have shown the largest sea-ice extent ever recorded, according to the Polarstern expedition. ANT-XXIV/3 was dedicated to examining the oceanic circulation and the oceanic cycles of materials that depend on it. Warming is a lot less global when you get south of Chile, it seems.

In the coming years autonomous measuring buoys will be used to find out whether the cold Antarctic summer induces a new trend or was only a 'slip.'

Under the direction of Dr. Eberhard Fahrbach, Oceanographer at the Alfred Wegener Institute, 58 scientists from ten countries were on board the research vessel Polarstern in the Southern Ocean from 6 February until 16 April, 2008. They studied ocean currents as well as the distribution of temperature, salt content and trace substances in Antarctic sea water.

In oceanography studies, the iron needed to fertilize infrequent plankton blooms in High Nutrient, Low Chlorophyll (HNLC) regions was assumed to come almost entirely from wind-blown dust.

That's not the case in the North Pacific, say Phoebe Lam and James Bishop of the Earth Sciences Division at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

They report that the key source of iron in the Western North Pacific is not dust but the volcanic continental margins of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kuril Islands.

A new modeling approach using sea ice motion data to follow parcels of ice backward in time at monthly intervals for up to 3 years while accumulating a history of the solar radiation and air temperature to which the ice was exposed offers new hope for increased accuracy in climate change models, say scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow. This is the only model based entirely on historical observations.

Using this new technique, the thickness of Arctic sea ice was estimated from 1982 to 2003. Results showed that average ice thickness and total ice volume fluctuated together during the early study period, peaking in the late 1980s and then declining until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, ice thickness slightly increased but the total volume of sea ice did not increase.

A team of scientists from Cardiff University’s School of Earth and Ocean Sciences and Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales travelled to Africa to find new evidence of climate change which helps explain some of the mystery surrounding the appearance of the Antarctic ice sheet.

Ice sheet formation in the Antarctic is one of the most important climatic shifts in Earth’s history. However, previous temperature records show no evidence of the oceans cooling at this time, but instead suggest they actually warmed, presenting a confusing picture of the climate system which has long been a mystery in palaeoclimatology.

The rise of oxygen and the oxidation of deep oceans between 635 and 551 million years ago had an impact on the increase and spread of the earliest complex life, including animals, according to a study in PNAS.

The atmosphere had almost no oxygen until 2.5 billion years ago and it was not until about 600 million years ago that the atmospheric oxygen level rose to a fraction of modern levels. Geologists and evolutionary biologists have speculated that the rise of the breathing gas and subsequent oxygenation of the deep oceans are intimately tied to the evolution of modern biological systems.

To test the interaction between biological evolution and environmental change, an international team of scientists from Virginia Tech, the University of Maryland, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, and Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined changes in the geochemistry and fossil distribution of 635- to 551-million-year old sediments preserved in the Doushantuo Formation in the Yangtze Gorges area of South China.

A comprehensive new study documents in detail the dynamics of parts of Greenland’s ice sheet, important data that have long been missing from the ice sheet models on which projections about sea level rise and global warming are based.

The research is published this month in the Journal of Glaciology, also demonstrates how remote sensing and digital imaging techniques can produce rich datasets without field data in some cases.

Traditionally, ice sheet models are very simplified, according to Beata Csatho, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology and lead author of the paper. The implications of these richer datasets may be dramatic, Csatho said, especially as they impact climate projections and sea-level rise estimates, such as those made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists from Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)aboard the research vessel Southern Surveyor returned home today with a collection of coral samples and photographs taken in the Southern Ocean at greater depths than ever before.

Using a remotely operated submersible vehicle the international research team captured images of life found on deep-sea pinnacles and valleys up to three kilometres beneath the Ocean’s surface.

During a three-week voyage, scientists from CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans National Research Flagship and the US collaborated to retrieve examples of live and fossilised deep-ocean corals from a depth of 1650 metres near the Tasman Fracture Zone, south-east of Tasmania.

Ice loss in Antarctica increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years due to a speed-up in the flow of its glaciers and is now nearly as great as that observed in Greenland, according to a new, comprehensive study by UC Irvine and NASA scientists.

In a first-of-its-kind study, an international team led by Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at UCI and a scientist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., estimated changes in Antarctica’s ice mass between 1996 and 2006 and mapped patterns of ice loss on a glacier-by-glacier basis. They detected a sharp jump in Antarctica’s ice loss, from enough ice to raise global sea level by 0.3 millimeters (.01 inches) a year in 1996, to 0.5 millimeters (.02 inches) a year in 2006.