Located southeast of Bermuda, Hydrostation ‘S’—a set of unmarked geographic coordinates (32 degrees 10 minutes North, 64 degrees 30 minutes West)—has yielded measurements of temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity and other parameters every two weeks for seven decades.

A diverse and abundant group of single-celled marine organisms, Rhizaria are known to affect carbon and other chemical cycles of the world’s oceans, but specifics are lacking. Research has been hampered by difficulties sampling, culturing and preserving many types of this protist super-group, and they have been underrepresented in models of global geochemical cycling as a result. Researchers and partners from two U.S. universities are seeking to change that narrative through a new three-year National Science Foundation-funded study.

Typically associated with the study of Earth’s upper atmosphere and beyond, satellites deployed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) also augment our understanding of Earth’s ecosystems, including critical information about the ocean such as locations of algal blooms and levels of marine photosynthesis.

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.

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.”

For more than a quarter century, the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) has been making physical, biological, and chemical oceanographic measurements in the open ocean off Bermuda. Once or twice each month, researchers and technicians board the research vessel Atlantic Explorer and head 50 miles (82 kilometers) southeast of Bermuda to an area in the Sargasso Sea, where they collect valuable data on water column properties (including temperature, dissolved oxygen, and salinity) as well as bacterial production, zooplankton distribution, and abundance. Their data also shed light on the transport and cycling of organic carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen.

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.

New research published in Nature has revealed the importance of mineral forms of iron in regulating the cycling of this bio-essential nutrient in the ocean.

Now in its eighth year, BIOS-SCOPE is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary initiative that annually gathers scientists from Bermuda, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States to explore fundamental questions about the ocean’s biogeochemical cycles and how diverse communities of marine microbes influence the carbon cycle and other fundamental processes and, ultimately, the planet’s ability to sustain life. An overarching goal of the project is to form and foster collaborations across scientific disciplines, an aspect that enables the team to advance their understanding of the interactions of organisms and compounds at various scales, across both time and ocean depths. Along the way, the principals and collaborators of BIOS-SCOPE (Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences – Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology) have formed professional bonds and friendships that add value to the work. On the eve of the program’s eleventh cruise from ASU BIOS – with 18 scientists and two marine science technicians on board, Currents spoke with BIOS-SCOPE Co-Principal Investigators and adjunct faculty Craig Carlson (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Stephen Giovannoni (Oregon State University) and Investigator Rachel Parsons (ASU BIOS Microbial Ecology Laboratory) about the project’s past, present and future.

In early February, the Government of Bermuda released a public report titled “The State of Bermuda’s Marine Waters: A Snapshot of Bermuda’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) from the Coastline to 200 nautical miles (nm).” It was released as part of the Bermuda Ocean Prosperity Programme (BOPP), a partnership between the Government of Bermuda, the Waitt Institute, and BIOS designed to sustainably protect and manage the island’s ocean resources. BOPP is also working with the Government and local industries, such as tourism and fisheries, to diversify national revenue and support the development of a “blue economy” that balances the sustainable use of ocean resources with marine ecosystem health.