Plos One News

Almost 14,000 archeological sites and national monuments in the United States could be lost by the year 2100 as seas rise due to climate change, scientists said on Wednesday. The findings offer a glimpse into the vast amount of global cultural heritage that could be destroyed, the study said. One in 10 archeological sites that it analysed on nine southeastern coastal states risk inundation. "The data are sobering: projected sea level rise ... will result in the loss of a substantial portion of the record of both pre-Columbian and historic period human habitation…

A recent NOAA study, published in the journal PLOS One, shows “living shorelines” — protected and stabilized shorelines using natural materials such as plants, sand, and rock — can help to keep carbon out of the atmosphere, helping to blunt the effects of climate change. This study, the first of its kind, measured carbon storing, or “carbon sequestration,” in the coastal wetlands and the narrow, fringing marshes of living shorelines in North Carolina. “Shoreline management techniques like this can help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while increasing coastal resilience,” said Russell Callender, Ph.D., acting director of NOAA’s National Ocean Service. Carbon can be stored or “sequestered” in plants when they take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during photosynthesis.

A record dolphin die-off in the northern Gulf of Mexico was caused by the largest oil spill in U.S. history, researchers said on Wednesday, citing a new study that found many of the dolphins died with rare lesions linked to petroleum exposure. Scientists said the study of dead dolphins tissue rounded out the research into a spike of dolphin deaths in the region affected by BP Plc's oil spill that was caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. Millions of barrels of crude oil spewed into Gulf waters…

There are plastic shopping bags, bottles, toys, action figures, bottle caps, pacifiers, tooth brushes, boots, buckets, deodorant roller balls, umbrella handles, fishing gear, toilet seats and so much more. Plastic pollution is pervasive in Earth's oceans. Researchers unveiled on Wednesday what they called the most scientifically rigorous estimate to date of the amount of plastic litter in the oceans - about 269,000 tons - based on data from 24 ship expeditions around the globe over six years.

The deep­sea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010’s Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill’s impacts, according to a scientific paper reported by the online 
scientific journal PLoS One, and cited by NOAA. The paper is the first to give comprehensive results of the spill’s effect on deep­water 
communities at the base of the Gulf’s food chain, in its soft­bottom muddy habitats, specifically 
looking at biological composition and chemicals at the same time at the same location.

Models Project Northward Distribution Shifts Using Temperature, Estuarine Habitats as Key Factors. NOAA scientists continue to develop and improve the approaches used to understand the effect of climate change on marine fisheries along the U.S. east coast. Their latest study projects that one common coastal species found in the southeast U.S., gray snapper, will shift northwards in response to warming coastal waters. In a study published online December 20 in the journal PLOS ONE…