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.

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 Phys.Org

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.

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.

Around this time last year, oceanographer Maureen Conte was on a research ship off the coast of Bermuda, hauling scientific instruments up out of the ocean.

Oceans are critical to stabilizing the world’s climate, absorbing a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions and capturing 90 percent of the excess heat they generate. By some estimates, the ocean also accounts for up to half the annual emissions of another greenhouse gas – nitrous oxide (N2O), the third most important climate emission after carbon dioxide and methane. With the climate changing amid record high atmospheric levels of all three gases, the importance of the marine nitrogen cycle is ripe for study.