Even casual observers of environmental science understand the fundamental interconnection between atmospheric conditions and the well-being of marine ecosystems. What happens in the atmosphere inevitably finds its way into the ocean and, vice versa, the outcomes of deep ocean processes eventually bubble up to the surface and into the air above. Yet, the authors of a recently published paper point out, one would be hard-pressed to find these connections between the air and ocean represented adequately – if at all – in international environmental policies and regulations.

Dr. Samantha Hallam and ASU BIOS COO Dr. Mark Guishard are teaming up again to expand upon the work related to the effect of upper ocean heat on Bermuda hurricanes conducted during Dr. Hallam’s internship at BIOS in 2019.

Oceans are constantly changing. These changes don’t only affect marine life but also have wide-reaching consequences for land dwellers. To document them, monitoring stations in the North Atlantic Ocean have been active for decades. Now, researchers have reported on the latest changes, showing that compared to 40 years ago, the ocean near the island of Bermuda is warmer, saltier, more acidic, and has lost oxygen. Long-term monitoring can provide information about existential challenges societies will face in the near future, the researchers said.

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.

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.

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.

Pteropods, or “wing-footed” sea snails and slugs, may be more resilient to acidic oceans than previously thought, scientists report.

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.

These are the findings from nearly forty years of shipboard observations made in the deep Sargasso Sea offshore of the verdant island and surrounding coral reefs of Bermuda.