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.

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.

Arizona State University launched four new ocean-focused degree programs within the College of Global Futures — a Bachelor of Science in ocean futures, a Bachelor of Science in ocean futures with a concentration in coastal and marine sciences, an online Master of Science in coastal and marine science and management, and a PhD in ocean futures.

$100 million vessel to be delivered to GSO in 2021

Richard Smith, In Memoriam – remembering ‘Chief’

BIOS marine superintendent and ship captain Quentin Lewis is calling the months ahead for the Institute’s research vessel the Atlantic Explorer “very healthy in terms of operating days.” At the start of 2021, BIOS has 195 days at sea funded for science programs, he said.

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.

Wedged between two windy weeks in April, calm weather descended upon Bermuda just as 11 graduate and PhD-bound students arrived at BIOS, primed to head out to sea for a taste of hands-on oceanography under the guidance of Institute scientists, technicians and support personnel.

Paul Gensbigler, 20, is no stranger to the water, having spent the past two years studying the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States. A junior majoring in molecular and cellular biology at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) in Maryland, Gensbigler is researching the microbes that help control nutrient levels in the Bay. However, this January he traded the brackish waters of the northern Chesapeake for the salty waters of the northern Atlantic in a “Hopkins Intersession Abroad” program.