In a future with higher temperatures and other climate changes, Alaska’s boreal forests could look significantly different than they do now.

NASA and the National Park Service are working together to create a web-based tool that helps park managers better understand the impact of outdoor lighting and noise on animal species in national parks.

Upwelling of deep, low pH, waters along the east Australian coast is a common and natural phenomenon, but together with ongoing human-induced ocean acidification it will result in additional stress to coral reef ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef as below a certain pH threshold reefs will become net dissolving.

A new study provides insight into the behavior of small sharks when encountering a common ocean phenomenon known as internal waves. These waves play powerful and still unknown roles in the exchange of heat, energy, water properties and nutrients throughout the ocean, and can change the vertical distribution of animals in the water column.

The study, to be published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography, found that sharks can respond actively to large internal waves, diving deeper and encountering colder temperatures, which has an energetic cost. The research is important to the conservation and management of Squalus acanthias, or dogfish, a once abundant but now globally declining species of shark.

“This is one of the first studies to describe how sharks or other large organisms respond to an internal wave,” said lead author Jesús Pineda, a benthic ecologist with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) on Cape Cod. “These sharks are a resource for New England fishermen, but worldwide it is a threatened species. There are many things we don’t understand about their physiology or their distribution. This study helps fill in a piece of the puzzle.”

Read more at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Image: Bands of smooth water alternated with bands of rough water can indicate the presence of an internal wave.  CREDIT: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Natural disasters such as hurricanes often leave devastation in their wake.

The fabled use of canaries in coal mines as an early warning of carbon monoxide stemmed from the birds’ extreme sensitivity to toxic conditions compared to humans. 

Low-income urban neighborhoods not only have more mosquitoes, but they are larger-bodied, indicating that they could be more efficient at transmitting diseases.

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) challenges have the potential to significantly impact the global supply of metals.

By now it’s well established that microplastics are a problem in the environment, even in the remotest parts of the planet. But where do different microplastics come from and how they get there, especially in the Arctic?

Antarctica’s ice sheets are still releasing radioactive chlorine from marine nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, a new study finds.