A new study led by the University of Plymouth has used more than six decades of data to show that plankton abundance is declining across vast swathes of the North East Atlantic – a region covering the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal to Norway, and the entirety of the North Sea.

University of Miami researchers and collaborators have expanded an offshore reef restoration and coastal resilience project off Miami Beach with the deployment of three 3D-printed SEAHIVE clustered structures. 

Coinciding with National Ocean Month, the second phase of the Engineering Coastal Resilience Through Hybrid Reef Restoration (ECoREEF) project advances an offshore living laboratory designed to study how engineered reef structures can be combined with active restoration of stony corals to produce self-building and self-repairing hybrid reefs that dissipate wave energy, reduce coastal flooding, and create new marine habitat.

The eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is known for its large low-oxygen zones that are increasing in size, putting marine life at risk. New research shows that 15 million years ago, the opposite was true. A Michigan State University study found that oxygen-deficient waters were distributed very differently during the mid-Miocene Epoch than they are today. The Pacific Ocean’s oxygen-deficient zones were much smaller, while the Atlantic’s were much larger. Scientists had never documented this reversal before. A computer model helped explain why. By recreating ancient ocean conditions, Associate Professor Dalton Hardisty’steam learned that a channel between North and South America allowed water to move freely between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, reshaping ocean circulation and changing where low-oxygen waters formed.

Mindelo (São Vicente). For five years now, a distinctive green laser beam has been shining at night up to 30 km above the harbour of the island’s capital. It forms part of a high-energy lidar with which the Leibniz Institute for Atmospheric Research (TROPOS) operates continuous aerosol and cloud measurements at the Ocean Science Centre Mindelo (OSCM).

The lidar is part of PollyNET, a global network of fixed and mobile lidar systems coordinated by TROPOS. This network enables the detection of airborne particles (aerosols) – such as desert dust, forest fire smoke, industrial pollution or even sea salt – as well as their trajectories across our planet. The remote sensing station in Mindelo complements the dust samples that have been collected of the island of São Vicente for almost 30 years in Calhau on the north-east coast.