Scientists are just starting to tease out the long-distance changes that hurricanes inflict on coastlines and the deep ocean alike. Read more at Wired.com

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.

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.

Conducting research can be a career-defining opportunity for an undergraduate student. This experience helps build their CV for graduate school, it can open doors to internships and jobs, and many students present their results at international scientific conferences. Recognizing the increasingly critical role that independent research plays in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, each fall BIOS welcomes a cohort of undergraduate interns as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program.

This summer marks year two of a three-year ASU BIOS study designed to expand understanding of how ocean eddies might be affecting coral reefs, as well as what role eddies may have played in reef accretion and overall functioning in the past.

There was a period during the last ice age when temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere went on a rollercoaster ride, plummeting and then rising again every 1,500 years or so. Those abrupt climate changes wreaked havoc on ecosystems, but their cause has been something of a mystery. New evidence shows for the first time that the ocean’s overturning circulation slowed during every one of those temperature plunges — at times almost stopping.

Each spring, when daffodils and other flowers emerge in gardens, tiny ocean plants called phytoplankton also undergo a surge of production and rapid growth near the surface of the Sargasso Sea. Although each marine phytoplankton is small—tinier than the period at the end of this sentence—it carries tremendous responsibilities.

More than a flower, the Oleander is a container ship that provides weekly service between Hamilton, Bermuda, and Port Elizabeth, N.J. In so doing, the ship traverses water from three very widely separated domains: cold, fresh subpolar water from the Labrador Sea; hot, salty Gulf Stream water from the tropics via the Gulf of Mexico; and the large body of warm, salty subtropical water south of the Gulf Stream.

Five years of data collected on reefs and offshore in Bermuda shows that coral reef chemistry – and perhaps the future success of corals – is tied not only to the human carbon emissions causing systematic ocean acidification, but also to seasonal and decadal cycles in the open waters of the Atlantic, and the balance of biochemical processes in the coral reef community.

For the past two decades, BIOS scientists have stood behind the idea that mesoscale eddies are a driving force in coastal and open ocean processes, including biogeochemical cycling and the global carbon cycle. As research technologies improved over this time period it became apparent that, not only were they correct, but that eddies are far more important to ocean and climate systems than previously imagined.