Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary — Following a 10-day search in Antarctic waters, the Greenpeace ship Esperanza confronted Japan’s whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary and immediately engaged in a high speed chase over hundreds of miles through fog and increasingly rough seas. The factory ship Nisshin Maru has now been driven out of the hunting grounds and all whaling has stopped -- for now.

A large amount of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide is produced by bacteria in the oxygen poor parts of the ocean using nitrites, Dr Mark Trimmer told journalists at a Science Media Centre press briefing.

Scientists have revealed an important discovery that raises doubts concerning the viability of plans to fertilize the ocean to solve global warming, a projected $100 billion venture.

The world’s oceans are becoming more acid, with potentially devastating consequences for corals and the marine organisms that build reefs and provide much of the Earth’s breathable oxygen.

In a commentary in the September 25, 2007, issue of the Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), a large team of scientists state that human-induced carbon dioxide emissions will alter ocean chemistry to the point where it will violate U.S.

The NASA-managed Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) instrument settled into orbit around Earth in 1997 and took its first measurements of ocean color. A decade later, the satellite's data has proved instrumental in countless applications and helped researchers paint a picture of a changing climate.

The release of sulfur and nitrogen into the atmosphere by power plants and agricultural activities plays a minor role in making the ocean more acidic on a global scale, but the impact is greatly amplified in the shallower waters of the coastal ocean, according to new research by atmospheric and marine chemists.

Australian scientists have identified the missing deep ocean pathway – or ‘supergyre’ – linking the three Southern Hemisphere ocean basins in research that will help them explain more accurately how the ocean governs global climate.

The thermal structure of the equatorial Indian Ocean is characterized by warmer temperatures in the east and cooler temperatures in the west. During certain years, this pattern switches to anomalous conditions known as the Indian Ocean Dipole; one such dipole event occurred in 2006.

In the Greenland, Iceland and Norwegian Seas, density and temperature differences cause cold, salty water to sink. Part of these dense water masses flow across the submarine sill between Iceland and Scotland.

Mid-latitude oceanic circulation in the southern hemisphere is traditionally thought to consist of distinct, basin-wide, circular currents, or gyres, contained within the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans.

Many earthquakes in the deep ocean are much smaller in magnitude than expected. Geophysicists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found new evidence that the fragmented structure of seafloor faults, along with previously unrecognized volcanic activity, may be dampening the effects of these quakes.