Archive for the ‘Oceanography’ Category
This is the amazing discovery that has made a group of scientists. The communication among bacteria may have a significant influence on the climate.
In the ocean, just enough bacteria congregate on tiny particles of carbon-rich debris that tend to sink to the seafloor.
The biogeochemists Laura Hmelo, Benjamin Van Mooy, and Tracy Mincer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that these bacteria emit chemical signals to discern if there are other bacteria in the neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »
Although the UK and the Aleutian Islands are on the same latitude, have very different climates, largely due to the difference in salinity between the North Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean and the system of ocean currents that characterize them.
Now a research team may have solved the mystery of why the Atlantic is saltier than the Pacific.
When cold, salty surface waters sink in the North Atlantic and begin their long journey to Antarctica, activates a complex pattern of ocean currents, one effect of which is transport to the shores of Europe of a large enough mass of hot water to mitigate significantly lower temperatures in much of the continent.
The North Pacific is not the same mechanism, because its salinity is much lower, and scientists have long speculated about the causes of this fact.
The new study by researchers at Oregon State University in the U.S., and the University of Hamburg in Germany, states that the cause of action that exert certain mountains and Antarctic ice mass. Read the rest of this entry »