Last year brought what seemed like a disturbing omen to communities surrounding Europe’s North Sea: a whole lot of beached sperm whales. As Gizmodo reported at the time, the whales entered the sea’s shallow waters, where their internal sonar-like systems stopped working, causing them to become stranded and die. But…
Lots of creatures glow in the ocean’s depths, where sunlight is slim to nil. But while most of these abyssal lightbulbs use their neon powers to hunt or avoid being hunted, deepwater corals may have beat everything else down there in terms of evolutionary creativity. New research indicates these corals glow in order…
Before yesterday, Claire&Max’s latest short film—which shows what New York City would look like if climate change continued, unabated, and sea levels rose high enough to flood it—was already unsettling. But with the US officially abdicating the Paris Agreement, this is now looks like a peek at a future that seems more…
In 2009, Kerry McPhail descended Jacques Cousteau-style towards the Axial Volcano, inside the cramped, 30-year-old little submarine DSV Alvin, with a pilot and another scientist. Three hundred miles off the coast of Oregon, they were collecting tubeworms, bacterial mats and bivalves living near a deep sea volcanic…
Great news, everyone! We’re getting better at measuring the changing temperature of the ocean. Unfortunately, the data shows that they are warming more rapidly than researchers thought.
As currents shift in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, they bring an abundance of nutrients and plankton to the region, luring predators of all sizes. Swarms of anchoveta arrive first for an easy meal, but soon find themselves having to come up with unique ways to fend off larger predators like sharks and tuna. The…
As if the ocean wasn’t already full of nightmares, researchers at MIT have developed a soft and flexible robot made of hydrogel, a material composed mostly of water. The new bot is quick, strong, and almost completely invisible when submerged, allowing it to snatch up fish before they even realize they’re being…
Animals, like humans, communicate in lots of different ways. One of those ways, in animals as in humans, involves urinating on one another.
Over thirteen thousand feet below the surface, hundred-foot hydrothermal vents spew black, 690 degree fluid like chimneys from the ocean floor. Tiny crabs, shrimp and limpets scuttle beneath the smokestacks, and a remotely-operated vehicle named SuBastian went down there recently to join them.
This year may have been a rough one up here on Earth’s dry surface, but beneath the waves ocean life flourished and dazzled. The world’s most prestigious underwater photography competition has just announced its winning images for 2016—and they’re absolutely spellbinding.
A remotely operated sub has captured stunning images of the Antarctic seafloor, revealing a surprisingly dynamic and colorful world filled with spidery starfish, coconut-shaped sponges, and dandelion-like worms.
In case you thought we’d figured out life in the oceans even a little bit, a new study published in Nature Communications sets the record straight. For the first time, scientists have found experimental evidence of underwater pollination. There are bees in the sea—or at least creatures that perform the same kind of…
A recent expedition to the explore marine life in the Marianas region of the Pacific has uncovered stunning new video of bubblegum coral, and the strange creatures who make these aquatic structures their home.
We tend to think of coral reefs as luminous, undersea jungles that pepper the shallow, scuba-friendly tropics. But deeper down, in a region about as bright as Pluto on a sunny day, there lie vast reef ecosystems unknown to science.
There are thousands of ships sailing the seas to catch the fish you eat, and now you can watch them sail the ocean in almost real-time on this interactive map
The sixth mass extinction—the one that seven billion humans are doing their darnedest to trigger at this very moment—is shaping up to be like nothing our planet has ever seen. That’s the conclusion of a sweeping new analysis, which compared marine fossil records from Earth’s five previous mass extinction events to…
As our planet heats up, the pace of sea level rise is expected to quicken, making it harder for cities like Miami to stay above water. But since 1992, scientists have studied Earth’s mean sea level via satellites, and they’ve watched it rise at a steady 3 millimeters per year—no evidence for acceleration.
A crew of NASA and ESA astronauts and researchers has arrived to underwater laboratory, Aquarius. They’ll be using the underwater conditions to simulate a crewed trip to Mars.
An underwater survey off the coast of Greece has uncovered a massive cache of wrecked ships, sunk over a span of more than 2,000 years. And researchers just keep finding more and more to add to that tally.
A brand new underwater microscope just took an unprecedentedly-close look at the deep seafloor. You can see the footage it took, including a microscopic coral cage-match, right here.
