The Gulf of America is experiencing accelerated sea-level rise driven by ocean dynamics, vertical land motion and warming waters, intensifying flood risks for coastal communities – especially rural, under-resourced areas with limited planning capacity. A new four-year, $900,000 grant supports high-resolution modeling, machine learning and community engagement to deliver precise local projections, deploy water sensors and build an accessible AI platform, equipping communities with actionable forecasts to strengthen resilience and long-term adaptation.

For scientists who study the Southern Ocean, a long-standing silver lining in the gloomy forecast of climate change has been the theory of iron fertilization. As temperatures rise and glaciers in Antarctica melt, ice-trapped iron would feed blooms of microscopic algae, pulling heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow.

There’s just one problem: The theory doesn’t hold water.

In what researchers describe as the most accurate measurement of iron inputs from a glacier in Antarctica, marine scientists from Rutgers University-New Brunswick have discovered that meltwater from an Antarctic ice shelf supplies far less iron to surrounding waters than once thought.

The findings, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, raise questions about the sources of iron in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, and could significantly alter how climate change predictions are forecasted and modeled, the researchers said.

New geological data indicate that marine life is somewhat resilient to warming in the tropics. Chris Fokkema, earth scientist at Utrecht University, discovered that tropical algae were largely unaffected by a number of periods of global warming of up to 1.5 degrees Celsius in the distant past. These unicellar organisms form the basis of food webs and are generally very sensitive to rising temperatures. Previous studies of periods of even greater warming showed a dramatic decline in these organisms. “Somewhere beyond those 1.5 degrees, a tipping point occurs.”

A research team from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS) reconstructed the record of the South China Sea Throughflow's volume transport from 1894 to 2022. Their findings were published in Science Advances on February 25.

New research shows that, off the U.S. West Coast, humpback whales face a higher risk of getting entangled in fishing equipment during years with lower availability of cool-water habitat, where the whales feed. Jarrod Santora of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS Climate on February 25^th.

A new study provides a comprehensive global synthesis of how vessel traffic affects large marine wildlife, including whales, dolphins, seals, manatees, sea turtles, sharks and rays.