An international team of scientists surveying the waters of the continental shelf off the West Coast of North America has discovered for the first time high levels of acidified ocean water within 20 miles of the shoreline, raising concern for marine ecosystems from Canada to Mexico.

If you were fortunate to spend time recently in the Maldives, a collection of tropical islands in the central Indian Ocean, you may have seen a collection of tiny aircraft buzzing overhead. With a wingspan of about eight feet and weighing less than 50 pounds, one might mistake them for a set of remote control planes. But these aircraft are no hobbyist's toys--they are sophisticated autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs), and they are providing scientists with important insights into how air pollution shapes global warming.

A new model simulation of Atlantic hurricane activity for the last two decades of this century projects fewer hurricanes overall, but a slight increase in intensity for hurricanes that do occur. Hurricanes are also projected to have more intense rainfall, on average, in the future. The findings are reported in a study by scientists at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J.

A team of young investigators have started an international project to measure permafrost temperatures — with bore holes in Svalbard, northern Sweden, Norway and Finland. The increased interest in the potential impact of global warming on permafrost has prompted the International Permafrost Association (IPA) to launch an IPY project, Thermal State of Permafrost (TSP), which aims to create a globally consistent approach to monitoring permafrost.

A large quantity of nitrogen compounds emitted into the atmosphere by humans through the burning of fossil fuels and the use of nitrogen fertilizers enters the oceans and may lead to the removal of some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, concluded a team of international scientists led by Texas A&M University Distinguished Professor of Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences Robert Duce.

A new NASA-led study shows that human-caused climate change has impacted a wide range of Earth's natural systems, from permafrost thawing to plants blooming earlier across Europe to lakes declining in productivity in Africa. Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York and scientists at 10 other institutions have linked physical and biological impacts since 1970 with rises in temperatures during that period.

NOAA scientists today released a 20-year study showing that environmental laws enacted in the 1970s are having a positive effect on reducing overall contaminant levels in coastal waters of the U.S. However, the report points to continuing concerns with elevated levels of metals and organic contaminants found near urban and industrial areas of the coasts. .

While the Arctic and the Antarctic experience similar greenhouse gas levels and solar radiation, each region responds in a dramatically different way, especially in temperature and loss of sea ice, says an international team of scientists that includes a NOAA oceanographer. While the Arctic is warming, most of Antarctica is not, largely because of the ozone hole, but projections indicate that is likely to change.

A new on-line map makes it possible, for the first time, to track disease outbreaks around the world that threaten the health of wildlife, domestic animals, and people. The Global Wildlife Disease News Map was developed jointly by the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the U.S. Geological Survey.

During the last decades, temperature maxima were regularly broken. A new study to be published May 1st in the international science magazine “Nature” suggests that a reprieve may be expected over the next decade, as natural climate variations may temporarily offset the long-term warming trend. This result was obtained by researchers from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (IFM-GEOMAR) in Kiel and the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Meteorology in Hamburg.

Scientists probing volcanic rocks from deep under the frozen surface of the Arctic Ocean have discovered a special geochemical signature until now found only in the southern hemisphere. The rocks were dredged from the remote Gakkel Ridge, which lies under 3,000 to 5,000 meters of water; it is Earth’s most northerly undersea spreading ridge. The study appears in the May 1 issue of the leading science journal Nature.

Past Earth Science and Climate Change News

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