This sponge can tell us a lot about climate change – WJXT News4JAX

A sponge recovered 430 feet deep in the ocean off Exuma Island can do more than scrub your back — it’s showing what the climate was like on Earth hundreds of years ago. Scientists used a 600-year-old marine sponge to…

Making a meal of DNA in the seafloor

(University of Vienna) While best known as the code for genetic information, DNA is also a nutrient for specialized microbes. An international team of researchers led by Kenneth Wasmund and Alexander Loy from the University of Vienna has discovered several bacteria in sediment samples from the Atlantic Ocean that use DNA as a food source. One bacterium newly named by the team in fact is a true expert in degrading DNA. The study is now published in Nature Microbiology.

Could temperatures keep rising?

Orbital changes are responsible for Milankovitch cycles that make Earth move in and out of periods of glaciation, or Ice Ages. Summer insolation on the Northern Hemisphere reached a peak some 10,500 years ago, in line with the Milankovitch cycles, and…

Fighting For The Truth About The Great Barrier Reef

It is an injustice that turtles are blown up in the Gulf of Mexico because American oil companies choose a particular and inappropriate method for undertaking surveys before setting explosives. If they did underwater, rather than aerial surveys, it would…

South Asia’s monsoon rains will intensify due to increase in CO2: Study

This is in line with climate model predictions that rising CO2 and higher global temperatures will lead to stronger monsoon seasons

Greenhouse gas levels keep rising at accelerating rates

At the Paris Agreement in 2015, politicians pledged to limit the global temperature rise from pre-industrial levels to 1.5°C and promised to stop rises in greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible and to make rapid reductions in accordance with…

Active seafloor volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Europa?

New research suggests active seafloor volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Are they linked to life? The planned Europa Clipper mission might provide answers.

The post Active seafloor volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Europa? first appeared on EarthSky.

Fossil secret may shed light on the diversity of Earth’s first animals

(University of Portsmouth) A large group of iconic fossils widely believed to shed light on the origins of many of Earth’s animals and the communities they lived in may be hiding a secret.Scientists, led by two from the University of Portsmouth, UK, are the first to model how exceptionally well preserved fossils that record the largest and most intense burst of evolution ever seen could have been moved by mudflows.

Update: Volcanic Activity Supplies ‘Natural’ Mercury To Antarctic Glaciers, Not Humans

UPDATED 6-1-2021: A just-released research study by Jon Hawkings of Florida State University concluded that several of Greenland’s subglacial rivers and associated river ocean outlet areas contain extremely high concentrations of Mercury (here, here, and quotes from Jon Hawkings shown…

Revenge of the seabed burrowers

(Yale University) The ancient burrowers of the seafloor have been getting a bum rap for years.These prehistoric dirt churners — a wide assortment of worms, trilobites, and other animals that lived in Earth’s oceans hundreds of millions of years ago — are thought to have played a key role in creating the conditions needed for marine life to flourish. Their activities altered the chemical makeup of the sea itself and the amount of oxygen in the oceans, in a process called bioturbation.