An international consortium has been formed to study the potential effects of adding iron to the ocean to promote the growth of phytoplankton.

The deep sediment cores brought up from the sea floor of the Bering Sea have shown that the area was devoid of ice the entire year, and the amount of biological activity was high during the last warm period in the history of the Earth.

There was a story which was written in the Arizona Daily Star which says “Tens of thousands of walruses have come ashore in northwest Alaska because the sea ice they normally rest on has melted. Federal scientists say this massive move to shore by walruses is unusual in the United States”. The “federal scientists” which the story mentions are supposed to be from the USGS, the U.S. Geological Survey.

“New strain of Oyster Herpes could kill off 80 percent of an oyster bed inside a week, experts have claimed”

There have been two separate studies in which researchers discovered that the ocean heating up has caused a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the ocean over the past 100 years. The studies also indicated that there is a link between the ambient temperature of the water of the ocean and the different patterns of marine biodiversity.

Scientists and conservationists might be barking up the wrong tree when it comes to finding corals which are suited to surviving the global climate crisis. This is according to a recent research paper which was published in the journal Science.

A recent study has found that Global Warming is slowing the growth of Coral in the Red Sea, and all growth could stop by the year 2070.

Out of the estimated 5.5 gigatonnes of carbon emitted each year by human activities, about 1.8 percent are removed from the air and stored by echinoderms such as starfish, sea urchins, brittle stars and sea lilies. This makes them less important “carbon sinkers” than plankton, but the finding is still significant since no one expected them to catch such a large chunk of our wayward carbon.

According to a new UN report, marine plants take 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide away from the atmosphere each year as they use the carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Most of these plants are plankton, but planktons rarely form a permanent carbon store on the seabed. Instead, mangrove forests, salt marshes and seagrass beds are responsible for locking away well over 50 percent of all carbon that is buried in the sea – an amazing feat when you consider that these types of habitat only comprise 1 percent of the world’s seabed.

Compared to the record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008, the Arctic Sea ice has made a slight recovery in 2009, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center. Despite this positive change, the minimum sea ice extent in 2009 was the third lowest since satellite record-keeping started in 1979.

Dr Parker, from James Cook University’s School of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, and collaborator Professor Rocky de Nys, from JCU’s School of Marine and Tropical Biology, have just received a $7,000 Collaboration Across Boundaries grant to prove their theory that feeding seaweed to cow will improve their digestion and make them produce less methane.

A moray eel species native to warm tropical waters have been caught in the considerably colder waters found off the coast of Cornwall, UK.

“The ‘underwater turbulence’ the jellies create is being debated as a major player in ocean energy budgets,” says marine scientist John Dabiri of the California Institute of Technology.

Jellyfish are often seen to be aimless aquatic drifters, propelled by nothing but haphazard currents and waves, but the truth is that these gooey creatures continuously contract and relax their bells to move in desired directions.

According to the simplest version of the so called Iron Hypothesis, plankton blooms move atmospheric carbon down to the deep sea and increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere can therefore be counteracted by promoting plankton blooms. The Iron Hypothesis derives its names from the suggestion that global warming can be thwarted by fertilizing plankton with iron in regions that are iron-poor but rich in other nutrients like nitrogen, silicon, and phosphorus, such as the Southern Ocean.

In a study announced today by the Wildlife Conservation Society* (WCS) at the International Coral Reef Initiative** (ICRI) meeting in Thailand, researchers show that some coral reefs located off East Africa are unusually resilient to climate change. The high resilience is believed to be caused by geophysical factors in combination with improved fisheries management in these waters.