Conservation research in submarine caves is among the clearest and most compelling use-cases for a small observation-class ROV like Trident, which is why, last week, we delivered the very first ROV for Good Sofar Ocean Trident to Dr. Leocadio Blanco-Bercial at the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences to study the hidden biodiversity in Bermuda’s Anchialine Caves.
International delegates are set to attend the fourth annual Bermuda Principles Foundation Conference, with this year’s event focused on transcriptomics.
We’re familiar with how climate change is impacting the ocean’s biology, from bleaching events that cause coral die-offs to algae blooms that choke coastal marine ecosystems, but it’s becoming clear that a warming planet is also impacting the physics of ocean circulation.
Read more at MaritimeProfessional.com
“Born out of Dr. Rick Spinrad’s challenge to build a robot that can cross the Atlantic, these long-endurance oceanic scale basin crossings with little yellow submarines are becoming more and more routine,” said Clayton Jones, Senior Director of Technology Teledyne Webb Research. “Along the way, we continue to entrain international and educational outreach and better our global ocean predictive skills – a testament to the foresight of Dr. Henry Stommel and Douglas Webb who were instrumental in bringing undersea gliders to life.”
Earlier this year, BIOS senior scientist and coral reef ecologist Eric Hochberg published a paper in the journal Coral Reefs that put numbers to a widely accepted concept in reef science: that materials in seawater (such as phytoplankton, organic matter, or suspended sediment) can affect how much light, as well as the wavelength of light, reaches the seafloor. This, in turn, impacts the ecology of organisms, including corals and algae, that live on the seafloor and rely on that light for photosynthesis.
A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science is changing the way that biological oceanographers view the swimming and sinking behaviors of open ocean, or pelagic, snails. Pteropods and heteropods are small marine snails, most measuring on the order of millimeters to centimeters, that are found throughout the world’s ocean from the surface to depths of 3000 feet (1000 meters). Although small in size, these organisms play a vital role in the ocean’s food web and biogeochemical cycles, as well as the global carbon cycle.
The risk of severe coral bleaching—a condition in which corals lose their symbiotic algae, called zooxanthellae—is five times more frequent today than it was forty years ago. Coral bleaching is a direct result of global warming, where rising temperatures cause marine heat waves, which place stress on the living coral animals, as well as the photosynthetic algae on which they depend for energy. This heat stress causes the algae to malfunction, at which point they are expelled by the corals, causing the organisms to lose their color and appear white (thus the term coral “bleaching”).
New research published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment uses data from two sustained open-ocean hydrographic stations in the North Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda to demonstrate recent changes in ocean physics and chemistry since the 1980s. The study shows decadal variability and recent acceleration of surface warming, salinification, deoxygenation, and changes in carbon dioxide (CO2)-carbonate chemistry that drives ocean acidification.