New research reveals how LED lights on seal decoys can deter great white sharks by disrupting their hunting behaviour. The study, inspired by marine creatures that use bioluminescence, found that altering the predator's view of prey silhouettes from below could lead to non-invasive shark deterrent technology.

Less than two percent of the abandoned wells in the Dutch part of the North Sea are leaking methane originating from shallow gas accumulations. That conclusion is reached by researchers from NIOZ and TNO, in collaboration with the Dutch State Supervision of Mines, SodM, published in Marine and Petroleum Geology on 12 November 2024. The outcome of this study alleviates concerns from earlier German research that concluded that one-third of all wells would leak methane from shallow gas accumulations.

A year after an outbreak of H5N1 killed thousands of elephant seals in Argentina, only about a third of the seals normally expected here returned. UC Davis scientists and partners estimate. A study chronicles the 2023 outbreak.

New research reveals for the first time how a major Antarctic ice shelf has been subjected to increased melting by warming ocean waters over the last four decades.

Scientists from the University of East Anglia (UEA) say the study - the result of their autonomous Seaglider getting accidentally stuck underneath the Ross Ice Shelf - suggests this will likely only increase further as climate change drives continued ocean warming.

A recently published study in Science challenges theories regarding the origins of a significant transition through the Earth’s ice ages. Led by an international team of researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and Cardiff University, this research provides fresh insights into the ocean’s role in climate during the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, an enigmatic interval of change in climate cycles that began about one million years ago.

Chromosphaera perkinsii is a single-celled species discovered in 2017 in marine sediments around Hawaii. The first signs of its presence on Earth have been dated at over a billion years, well before the appearance of the first animals. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has observed that this species forms multicellular structures that bear striking similarities to animal embryos. These observations suggest that the genetic programs responsible for embryonic development were already present before the emergence of animal life, or that C. perkinsii evolved independently to develop similar processes. Nature would therefore have possessed the genetic tools to “create eggs” long before it “invented chickens”. This study is published in the journal Nature. 

An epidemiological study found that 56% of a large breeding colony of Caspian terns died from a 2023 outbreak of highly pathogenic avian influenza at Rat Island in Washington state. Since then, no birds have successfully bred on the island, raising concerns that the outbreak may have had a significant impact on an already declining Pacific-coast population. As part of the study, researchers also documented that the avian flu virus H5N1was transmitted to harbor seals for the first time in the northeastern Pacific. While there has not been another large coastal wildlife outbreak of H5N1 since, researchers estimated that about 10-14% of the Caspian tern population in the Pacific flyway have been lost to H5N1 infections.

The presence of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in all the world’s oceans but one has been in steady decline since 2001, when 152 countries agreed on a comprehensive global ban. The exception has been the Arctic Ocean, which has seen a sharp rise in POPs in its frigid waters over the past several decades. A new study in Science Advances says ocean and air currents are transporting POPs northwards, where cold waters extend their half-lives. This could impact the overall health of the fragile Arctic ecosystem as it permeates the food web.

Dr. Yaqing Jin, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at The University of Texas at Dallas, was recently named an Early-Career Fellow of the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine for his research on offshore wind turbine safety. He is one of five fellows joining the Offshore Energy Safety Track, where their work will focus on contributing to the understanding, management and reduction of systemic risk in offshore energy activities.