A group of six international companies has announced plans to build an ultra-high speed, undersea, fiber-optic cable under the Pacific Ocean, between Japan and the United States. The project is meant to improve Internet and other telecommunication traffic between the U.S. and Asia, and comes as several other companies have begun similar ventures. Naomi Martig reports from VOA's Asia News Center in Hong Kong.

A review of all available ocean data records concludes that the low-oxygen events which have plagued the Pacific Northwest coast since 2002 are unprecedented in the five decades prior to that, and may well be linked to the stronger, persistent winds that are expected to occur with global warming.

The strength and duration of an El Niсo event are generally thought to depend on changes in subtropical overturning cells (STCs), in which water subducts into the subtropics, flows to the equator, upwells, and returns poleward along the surface.

Gray whales in the Pacific Ocean, long thought to have fully recovered from whaling, were once three to five times as plentiful as they are now, according to a report to be published September 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It has been reported that tropical storm Flossie has now been upgraded to a Hurricane by the National Hurricane Center. The storm formed on Wednesday and was halfway between Mexico and Hawaii.

Coral reefs in much of the Pacific Ocean are dying faster than previously thought, according to a study released Wednesday, with the decline driven by climate change, disease and coastal development.

Researchers cruising for creatures that live in the deepest parts of the Pacific Ocean found a new species of sea anemone living in the unlikeliest of habitats - the carcass of a dead whale.

Scientists have found one of the largest fields of seafloor vents gushing super-hot, mineral-rich fluids on a mid-ocean ridge that, until now, remained elusive to the ten-year hunt to find them.

After years of results that repeatedly dogged him, University of Oregon geologist Douglas R. Toomey decided to follow the trail of data surfacing from the Pacific Ocean. In doing so, he and his collaborators may have altered long-held assumptions involving plate tectonics on the ocean floor.