The mystery of the missing deep ocean carbon fixers
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 7-Dec-2025 11:11 ET (7-Dec-2025 16:11 GMT/UTC)
A new study published in Scientific Reports reports the discovery of a remarkably extensive hydrothermal vent field on the shelf of Milos Island, Greece. The vents were identified during the METEOR expedition M192, where the research team used a combination of different methods, including underwater technologies such as an autonomous and a remotely operated vehicles, to survey the seafloor. These approaches revealed previously undocumented venting between 100 and 230 meters depth. This makes Milos home to one of the largest known shallow-to-intermediate hydrothermal systems in the Mediterranean and substantially expands current knowledge of vent distribution in the region.
01 December 2025 / Kiel. A study by an international team involving the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel shows that the expansion of Antarctic Bottom Water during a major warming phase around 12,000 years ago displaced a carbon-rich mass of deep-water in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean. This process released carbon dioxide that had been stored in the deep ocean, thereby contributing to the end of the last Ice Age. The study provides important insights into how the ocean may respond as Antarctica continues to warm today. The findings are published today in Nature Geoscience.
Slow earthquakes have been discovered to exhibit anomalously slow, long-lasting, and small slips, adjacent to regular earthquakes where we sometimes feel catastrophic vibration. However, no one knows the reason why they show such strange characteristics. In a study published in a scientific journal Nature Communications, researchers at The University of Osaka succeeded in experimentally reproducing the multiple features of slow earthquakes in the lab and suggested the grain-scale origin of them based on their direct observations.
A new study published in Science Advances overturns a long-standing paradigm in climate science that stronger Northern Hemisphere summer insolation produces stronger tropical rainfall. Instead, a precisely dated 129,000-year rainfall reconstruction from a Cuban cave shows that the Caribbean often did the opposite, drying during intervals of intensified summer insolation.