Look Out Below: Sea Level and Global Warming
The precise role that global warming plays in determining sea level is a subject of considerable controversy. But many scientists believe there is a link.
Look Out Below: Monitoring Sea Level Changes
Monitoring sea level change has not been easy because of difficulties in measuring sea level in some places. Improvements in satellite technology, however, have enabled scientists to cover a much greater area than ever before as part of the measurem...
Survivors: Survival in the Intertidal Zone
Perhaps nowhere on Earth is the ability to survive better demonstrated than that part of the shore alternately exposed and submerged by tides-a region known as the intertidal zone. Remarkably, marine organisms there have evolved a multitude of ways ...
The Ocean's Memory: Terrigenous Sediments
Sediment is the debris that accumulates on the surface of the Earth as the result of chemical, physical and biological processes. Most sediment, known as terrigenous sediment, forms when rain falls on soil and washes it into rivers, which then carry...
Something in the Air: Weather Forecasting
In large part due to computer modeling and data from satellites, meteorologists are making significant progress in their efforts to increase both the accuracy and the utility of their forecasts.
Survivors: Long-Term Survivors
Despite the challenges of long-term survival on Earth, some phyla-including sponges, jellyfish, arthropods and mollusks-have endured for hundreds of millions of years, even in the most extreme environments.
Survivors: Early Invertebrates
The first animals on Earth were invertebrates-animals without backbones-and they diversified rapidly in the geologic period known as the Cambrian.
The Ocean's Memory: Obtaining and Analyzing Sediment Samples
Despite its temporary nature, sediment remains uniquely valuable. As a result, oceanographers have worked hard to refine the process of obtaining and analyzing sediment samples.
The Ocean's Memory: Oil, Gas and Manganese Nodules
Sediment is a uniquely valuable commodity within the marine environment. Oil, natural gas, coal, diamonds, gravel, sand, tin and titanium are all associated with marine sediment. Perhaps the most famous potential deep sea deposits are manganese nodu...
On the Coast: Defining the Coast
There is no universally accepted definition of coast. It is essentially a boundary between the land and the sea, but it's a broad zone rather than a single line.