About 19 million years ago, something terrible happened to sharks. Fossils gleaned from sediments in the Pacific Ocean reveal a previously unknown and dramatic shark extinction event, during which populations…
Category: Earth
A new book explores how military funding shaped the science of oceanography
Science on a MissionNaomi OreskesUniv. of Chicago, $40 In 2004, Japanese scientists captured the first underwater images of a live giant squid, a near-mythical, deep-ocean creature whose only interactions with…
Corals’ hidden genetic diversity corresponds to distinct lifestyles
Stony corals that build reefs have been hiding their diversity in plain sight. A genetic analysis of the most widespread reef coral in the Indo-Pacific revealed that rather than being…
Dazzling underwater photos capture new views and scientific detail of fish larvae
The open ocean is a veritable soup of tiny critters, including newborn fishes. It’s hard to learn about them, though, because they are mere millimeters long and semitransparent. When netted…
Some bacteria are suffocating sea stars, turning the animals to goo
The mysterious culprit behind a deadly sea star disease is not an infection, as scientists once thought. Instead, multiple types of bacteria living within millimeters of sea stars’ skin deplete…
How kelp forests off California are responding to an urchin takeover
Joshua Smith has been diving in kelp forests in Monterey Bay along the central coast of California since 2012. Back then, he says, things looked very different. Being underwater was…
Earth’s oceans are storing record-breaking amounts of heat
Pandemic-related shutdowns may have spared Earth’s atmosphere some greenhouse gas emissions last year, but the world continued to warm. Water temperature measurements from around the globe indicate that the total…
A new book shows how animals are already coping with climate change
Hurricane Lizards and Plastic SquidThor HansonBasic Books, $28 As a conservation biologist, Thor Hanson has seen firsthand the effects of climate change on plants and animals in the wild: the…
How climate change may shape the world in the centuries to come
It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how ongoing climate change might transform…
A new map shows where carbon needs to stay in nature to avoid climate disaster
Over decades, centuries and millennia, the steady skyward climb of redwoods, the tangled march of mangroves along tropical coasts and the slow submersion of carbon-rich soil in peatlands has locked…
