The world’s first Ocean Risk Summit held in Bermuda recently drew leaders from across political, economic, environmental and risk sectors to identify the potential exposures to ocean-related risk and tackle its broad-ranging consequences.

In 2014, leading coral scientists put out a blunt report: reefs in the Caribbean were in such bad shape they were at risk of vanishing within two decades. And that was before the most recent global coral-bleaching crisis hit the region hard in 2015.

$100 million vessel to be delivered to GSO in 2021

In a multi-national collaborative study published August 22, 2018 in Science Advances, climate simulations and subsequent analyses of tropical cyclone activity were led by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), the University of Melbourne and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). Project leads used climate models to estimate the maximum number of tropical cyclones that might occur in the North Atlantic in the current climate.

Amy Maas, Ferhat Karakas and David Murphy never know what they’re going to turn up when they go trawling for zooplankton. ‘We work on the swimming of various sea butterfly species’, says Murphy, adding that unlike true butterflies, sea butterflies are miniscule snails that live at depth and swim to the surface at night, propelled by minute wings like flying insects. But one day in September 2017, the trio was in for a surprise. In addition to their usual haul of sea butterflies, Karakas and Maas turned up a pair of tiny heteropod snails, Atlanta selvagensis. ‘I had never heard of heteropods before’, admits Murphy. As virtually nothing was known about these rare aquatic molluscs, the trio rushed them back to Murphy’s high-tech zooplankton movie set in the lab, in the hope of catching them in the act of swimming.

Supervisors can help to shape the lives and careers of their students and trainees. Sometimes, they become lifelong mentors and eventual collaborators, contributing to a new generation of scientific discovery. And students can forge meaningful relationships with those senior scientists even at the earliest stages of their science careers.

With sadness, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS) has received news of the passing of former BIOS Trustee and Life Trustee, Mr. Harvey Eugene (Gene) Lehman.

Minister of Education Diallo Rabain recently visited the science, technology, engineering and mathematics [STEM] class at Clearwater Middle School.

Researchers in Bermuda have released a new study on how corals absorb light in different conditions.

Shane Antonition said: “The sources of microplastics in our waters are multifaceted. These can range from litter that originated from Bermuda such as through accidental releases, though most of it comes from overseas on the ocean currents.