What's New Archive
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Recently published papers on Axial Seamount in the journal Nature Geoscience present, for the first time, precursory signals recorded by seafloor instruments before an undersea volcanic eruption. NOAA and Oregon State University scientists Dr. Bill Chadwick and Dr. Bob Dziak suggest that such signals could be used to issue both long-term and short-term forecasts of future eruptions at the site.
For more information please visit the NOAA Vents Program website.
Bering Sea marine mammals, birds, and fish are shifting where they eat, bear their young, and make their homes in response to changes in sea ice extent and duration. These patterns of change are documented in a special issue of the journal of Deep Sea Research II now available online with many authors from PMEL’s Ecosystem & Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations program.
You can read more on the NOAA press release.
PMEL scientists with the Fisheries Oceanography program helped deploy a drifter adopted by Ballard High School's Oceanography class as part of NOAA’s Adopt a Drifter program. The drifter was lowered off the side of the NOAA ship Oscar Dysonin the Bering Sea and will travel with the ocean currents while students track its path and predict where it might go next.
For more information, please visit NOAA’s Adopt a Drifter program website.
Come explore, celebrate, learn and discover all that NOAA does in Seattle at an Open House on Friday June 8 as part of the 2012 Science Festival with the Pacific Science Center. Join us for guided tours, lectures, and films plus meet with real NOAA scientists and engineers to ask them those hard questions about what is happening to our planet.
For more information please visit the Science Festival calendar page. Hope to see you all there!
PMEL’s Dr. Richard Feely is one of the authors on a recently released article in Limnology and Oceanography providing the first concrete evidence in North America that carbon dioxide being taken up by the oceans is killing oyster larvae. Scientists found that when oyster larvae were exposed to deep, more corrosive waters they did not survive to adulthood.
For more information on ocean acidification and the research being done at PMEL please visit the Carbon Group web page.
PMEL scientists have found a large reduction in the amount of the coldest deep ocean water, called Antarctic Bottom Water, all around the Southern Ocean over the past few decades. Sarah Purkey, a University of Washington graduate student, and PMEL’s Dr. Gregory Johnson present these findings in Journal of Climate article now available online.
Changes in this water mass contribute to sea level rise and Earth’s heat uptake. Read more in the NOAA press release.
Lessons learned from the March 11, 2011 Tohoku tsunami are highlighted in a recent Nature article nearly a year after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that killed over 18,000 people. This tsunami highlighted the need for a more accurate warning system for those shorelines closest the earthquake. Scientists at PMEL are working with international colleagues to develop a system that will be able to predict the severity of coastal flooding faster in order to issue accurate and timely warnings.
Please visit the NOAA Center for Tsunami Research website for more information.
The NOAA Vents Program is proud to be a large part of a recently published special issue of Oceanography and supplement that focuses on over 20 years of research on mid ocean spreading centers and underwater volcanic activity. The RIDGE and Ridge 2000 programs are summarized in the special issue and features articles from many PMEL scientists including our University of Washington and Oregon State University partners.
For more information on ongoing research in the NOAA Vents Program please visit their website.
PMEL’s Atmospheric Chemistry group is currently taking part study to try and understand why ozone levels occasionally soar above health-based standards in the winter in rural Utah. PMEL’s role is to measure properties of atmospheric particles and snow, including chemical composition, to assess their role in ozone production.
Other participants include NOAA’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory, the EPA, Utah Department of Environmental Quality, Utah State University and others.
Using Argo float data, scientists including PMEL’s Dr. Greg Johnson and JIMAR’s Dr. John Lyman, published a paper in Nature Geoscience that concludes the Earth has been accumulating heat continuously, mostly in the ocean, between 2001 and 2010. The paper describes how the heat balance measured at the top of the atmosphere is consistent with observed ocean warming, implying that there is probably no ‘missing energy’ in the system as had been suspected.
Visit PMEL’s Argo Float program website for more information.