Over the next four months, NOAA scientists will launch unmanned ocean vehicles, called Saildrones, from the Arctic to the tropical Pacific Ocean to help better understand how changes in the ocean are affecting weather, climate, fisheries and marine mammals. The wind and solar-powered research vehicles that resemble a sailboat will travel thousands of miles across the ocean, reaching some areas never before surveyed with such specialized technology.
Born in the Sargasso Sea, that Atlantic Ocean gyre east of Bermuda, baby European eels will travel 4,000 miles to the freshwater rivers of Europe. Now scientists might have answered a century-old question of how these young eels accomplish such vast oceanic migrations.
Ocean acidification is spreading rapidly in the western Arctic Ocean in both area and depth, potentially affecting shellfish, other marine species in the food web, and communities that depend on these resources, according to new research published in Nature Climate Change by NOAA, Chinese marine scientists and other partners.
For Bill Mook, coastal acidification is one thing his oyster hatchery cannot afford to ignore.
He teamed up with fisherman-turned-oceanographer Joe Salisbury of the University of New Hampshire to adapt and install a new tool to help shellfish growers better prepare for ocean acidification.
For the first time, NOAA and partner scientists have connected the concentration of human-caused carbon dioxide in waters off the U.S. Pacific coast to the dissolving of shells of microscopic marine sea snails called pteropods.
NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (OAP) and the Northeast Sea Grant Programs joined together to prioritize and fund new research on how ocean acidification is affecting marine life including lobsters, clams, oysters, mussels and sand lance that are so important to the Northeast region. Funding includes $800,000 in federal funds from the two programs with an additional $400,000 non-federal match.
At first glance they might be mistaken for toys, but these remote-controlled devices aren’t for play. Unmanned aircraft and watercraft are being put to work by NOAA scientists to gather astonishing new data from our wildlands and waterways.
NOAA Research and NOAA Fisheries have teamed up with academic and private sector partners to test innovative technologies that, if successful, will enable researchers to gather information on ocean conditions and marine species in remote areas of the ocean that are costly to reach and difficult to study.
NOAA today announced that Jonathan R. Pennock, Ph.D., the director of New Hampshire Sea Grant and a longtime coastal scientist, will be the new leader of NOAA’s National Sea Grant College Program.
Rising levels of acidity in the ocean and growing areas of low-oxygen waters are a “double whammy” threat for fishing industries, ecosystems and economies along the U.S. West Coast and Canada’s British Columbia, according to new report by a panel of experts that includes NOAA scientists.