April 18, 2020 By Brian K. Sullivan Bloomberg
The world’s seas are simmering, with record high temperatures spurring worry among forecasters that the global warming effect may generate a chaotic year of extreme weather ahead.
April 17, 2020 By C. Drew Harvell The New York Times
Now the world is seeing the deadly path cut by a terrestrial pandemic, spread by a new coronavirus that has killed tens of thousands of people worldwide as it continues its sweep. If anything good is to emerge from this, it will be in the quest to better understanding pathogens and their hosts, to find nature’s best defenses and to apply these findings to engineer a safer world.
April 15, 2020 By Linwood Pendleton, Karen Evans, Martin Visbeck PNAS
The current scale, pace, and practice of ocean scientific discovery and observation are not keeping up with the changes in ocean and human conditions. We need fundamental changes in the way that researchers work with decision makers to co-create knowledge that will address pressing development problems.
April 15, 2020 By Graham Readfearn The Guardian
Brightening clouds with salt crystals and deploying slicks of coral larvae to try and limit the impacts of global heating on the Great Barrier Reef are among more than 40 concepts being backed by the Australian government in an ambitious $150m research and development program. A two-year feasibility study released by the government on Thursday has reduced about 160 potential ideas to a list of 43 that will be funded for further investigation under the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP).
April 14, 2020 By Paul Voosen Science Magazine
Late in 2018, just after its arrival in orbit, NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite passed over an iconic site from the atomic age. By chance, its laser altimeter, used mostly to measure the changing height of polar ice, bounced light off the exposed rocks of Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, home to 23 nuclear weapons tests. Then, mission scientists looked closer: To their surprise, the laser was also generating underwater reflections.