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Fossil skeletons of an unusual land-roaming Cuban crocodile, a tortoise and 25 species of birds including a raptor known as a caracara are among the ancient treasures recently discovered in a sinkhole in the Bahamas. Expert diver Brian Kakuk and his colleagues retrieved these fossils, along with the bones of a lizard, snakes, humans and bats, along the floor and walls of Sawmill Sink, a saltwater cavern of a type called a blue hole on Abaco Island
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In mid-February, at the height of Austral summer, the sun in the Antarctic never sets. Nor did the work ever stop for University of Hawaii oceanography professor Chris Measures and his team of trace-metals oceanographers, who worked around the clock measuring dust from the decks of the Scripps Insitution of Oceanography research vessel Roger Revelle. The researchers affixed bouquets of trumpet-shaped filters to the ship's mast to trap dust from the air, and for every degree of longitude, they sampled the sea, plunging a contraption of cylindrical bottles to the depths of the upper ocean, screening water for remnants of dissolved dust and the trace amounts of iron and aluminum they contain
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Emperor penguins may have a supercharged form of a blood protein that allows them to dive underwater for more than 20 minutes on a single breath, a new study suggests. The research showed that penguins in Antarctica return from long fishing excursions under the sea ice with the lowest blood oxygen levels ever recorded in wild animals
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A Hong Kong-registered oil tanker leaked 10,810 tons, or 66,000 barrels, of crude oil off South Korea's stormy west coast today, officials said, in what was estimated to be the nation's largest maritime oil spill. A band of oil about three miles long was snaking slowly toward the coast, which is dotted with scenic beaches, wildlife habitats and oyster and other fishing beds
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Wetpixel associate editor and professional photographer Alex Mustard will be giving a talk at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK at 7:30PM on Thursday, December 6, entitled "Adventures of an underwater photographer - creating images that engage people with the oceans."
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Damming the Red Sea could alleviate growing energy demands in the Middle East, engineers say, but such a massive project could also have untold ecological impacts, like those brought about by other major dams worldwide
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A new and compelling argument for reducing fish harvests - the profit motive - could persuade world fishers to endure the short-term pain of lower catches for the long-term gain of higher returns for their labor, according to authors of a ground-breaking study on fisheries over-exploitation
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New deep-sea images disprove doctrine Thousands of white crabs grazing on an extensive mussel bed: Up to now such high biomasses in the deep sea were only known from hot vents. Now scientists from the MARUM at the University of Bremen have found such scenes at a cold vent off the coast of Pakistan. Another first was achieved by the videos they took of the cold-vent fluids seeping from the sea floor. Furthermore, the scientists were astonished at the wide variety of seep types
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An environmental group is urging companies to drop shark fin from their banquet menus as demand rises in the booming economy ahead of the holiday hospitality season, a media report said Tuesday
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Scientists know this already, but just to give you some idea of the problem, the Greenland ice cap is melting at such a fast rate it is triggering earthquakes as pieces of ice several cubic kilometres in size break up. Scientists say the acceleration of melting and subsequent speeding up of giant glaciers could be catastrophic in terms of sea level rise and make previous predictions published this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) far too low. The glacier at Ilulissat, which it is believed spawned the iceberg which sank the Titantic, is now flowing three times faster into the sea than it was 10 years ago
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