thinkprogress.org - by Joe Romm - January 15, 2019
A stunning new study on Antarctic sea ice collapse greatly raises the risk of a 10-foot sea level rise this century if President Donald Trump’s climate policies aren’t quickly reversed.
Warming ocean waters drove a 6-fold increase in annual ice mass loss from the Antarctic ice sheet between 1979 and 2017, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It’s been known for a while that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) was unstable and collapsing at an accelerating rate due to global warming. But the new study finds that parts of the vastly larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) are also disintegrating.
An artist’s rendering of a deep-sea vehicle designed by Dutch company IHC to harvest polymetallic nodules from the seabed. Royal IHC
greenbiz.com - by Todd Woody - September 28, 2017
At the International Seabed Authority’s ocean-side headquarters, delegates from dozens of countries strolled through breezeways adorned with the works of Jamaican artists as the United Nations-chartered organization’s annual meeting began its second week. No one, however, was entering a conference room where the seabed authority’s Legal and Technical Commission (LTC) was in session and men in dark suits stood watch. A sign advised that the meeting was "closed."
Behind heavy wood doors, the 30 members of the commission convened in secret to discuss, among other things, confidential contracts issued to corporations and state-backed companies to explore and potentially mine vast, barely explored deep-sea habitats that scientists believe play a key role in the global ecosystem.
WASHINGTON -- The amount of man-made heat energy absorbed by the seas has doubled since 1997, a study released Monday showed.
Scientists have long known that more than 90 percent of the heat energy from man-made global warming goes into the world's oceans instead of the ground.
And they've seen ocean heat content rise in recent years. But the new study, using ocean-observing data that goes back to the British research ship Challenger in the 1870s and including high-tech modern underwater monitors and computer models, tracked how much man-made heat has been buried in the oceans in the past 150 years.
A September 2008 photo released by the Ocean Conservancy on March 10, 2009, shows a trash-covered beach in Manilla, Philippines. (Tamara Thoreson Pierce/Ocean Conservancy/AP)
washingtonpost.com - by Sarah Kaplan - January 20, 2016
There is a lot of plastic in the world’s oceans.
It coagulates into great floating “garbage patches” that cover large swaths of the Pacific. It washes up on urban beaches and remote islands, tossed about in the waves and transported across incredible distances before arriving, unwanted, back on land. It has wound up in the stomachs of more than half the world’s sea turtles and nearly all of its marine birds, studies say . . .
. . . But that quantity pales in comparison with the amount that the World Economic Forum expects will be floating into the oceans by the middle of the century.