American Geophysical Union News

Sea ice predictions have improved markedly since the founding of an international forecasting and monitoring network 14 years ago.“These forecasts are quite encouraging in their increasing accuracy,” said Uma Bhatt, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. Bhatt spoke about the Sea Ice Prediction Network at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting last month.As the amount of sea ice in the Arctic declines, thins and becomes more mobile…

Following another year of stark climate impacts in the Arctic, scientists warned Tuesday of a new scourge hitting the region: marine trash.With the region warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, sea ice that has long blanketed the Arctic Ocean is disappearing, opening new routes to shipping. Scientists began noticing the trash bobbing in the icy water or piling up on Alaska Bering Strait-area beaches last year.“That’s a direct result of increased human maritime activities…

Rising levels of CO2 are making it hard for fish to breathe in addition to exacerbating global warming and ocean acidification. Climate change has caused a drop in the amount of oxygen dissolved in the oceans in some parts of the world, and those effects should become evident across large parts of the ocean between 2030 and 2040, according to a new study led by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. The oceans receive their oxygen supply from the surface via the atmosphere or from phytoplankton, which release oxygen in the water by photosynthesis. When the oceans are warmed they absorb less oxygen and marine life tend to move more slowly.

Shifts in trade winds and ocean currents powered a resurgence of endangered Galapagos Penguins over the past 30 years, according to a new study led by researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). These changes enlarged a cold pool of water the penguins rely on for food and breeding—an expansion that could continue as the climate changes over the coming decades, according to the study. The Galapagos Islands, a chain of islands 1,000 kilometers west of mainland Ecuador, are home to the only penguins in the Northern Hemisphere.

Maritime traffic on the world’s oceans has increased four-fold over the past 20 years, according to a new study quantifying global ship traffic. The research used satellite data to estimate the number of vessels on the ocean every year between 1992 and 2012. The number of ships traversing the oceans grew by 60% between 1992 and 2002. Shipping traffic grew even faster during the second decade of the study, peaking at a rate of increase of 10 percent per year in 2011. Traffic increased in every ocean during the 20 years of the study…

Most of U.S. coast may see 30 or more days a year of floods up to 2 feet above high tides. By 2050, a majority of U.S. coastal areas are likely to be threatened by 30 or more days of flooding each year due to dramatically accelerating impacts from sea level rise, according to a new NOAA study, published in the American Geophysical Union’s online peer-reviewed journal Earth’s Future. The findings appear in the paper From the Extreme to the Mean: Acceleration and Tipping Points for Coastal Inundation due to Sea Level Rise…

Maritime traffic on the world’s oceans has increased fourfold over the past 20 years, according to a strudy recently published by the American Geophysical Union which examined international ship traffic. The research, which used satellite data to estimate the number of vessels on the ocean every year between 1992 and 2012, found that the number of ships traversing the oceans grew by 60 percent over the time span, while shipping traffic grew even faster during the second decade of the study, peaking at rate of increase of 10 percent per year in 2011.

Monitoring efforts along the Pacific Coast of the U.S. and Canada have detected the presence of small amounts of radioactivity from the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant accident 100 miles (150 km) due west of Eureka, California. Scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) found the trace amounts of telltale radioactive compounds as part of their ongoing monitoring of natural and human sources of radioactivity in the ocean. In the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami off Japan, the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant released cesium-134 and other radioactive elements into the ocean at unprecedented levels. Since then, the radioactive plume has traveled west across the Pacific, propelled largely by ocean currents and being diluted along the way.

"It’s not a question of 'if' there will be nearly ice-free summers, but 'when,' say two NOAA scientists. James Overland of NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory and Muyin Wang of the NOAA Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Ocean at the University of Washington, consider that the Arctic summers will be ice free before 2050 and possibly within the next decade or two. The two scientists looked at three methods of predicting when the Arctic will be nearly ice free in the summer in a work that was published recently online in the American Geophysical Union publication Geophysical Research Letters. “Rapid Arctic sea ice loss is probably the most visible indicator of global climate change…

The Norwegian Sea could be a safe dumping ground for carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas blamed for global warming, Norway's Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center said. The center has proposed a research project where liquid CO2 would be pumped directly from offshore oil and gas fields to the deep waters of the Norwegian Sea to see if it could be stored there safely. The project will ascertain whether CO2 pumped 800 m down into the Norwegian Sea will dissolve and spread to the Atlantic Ocean before eventually being neutralized by ocean bed sediments. "The oceans already absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but this can take up to a thousand years," Helge Drange, research leader at the center, said.