The term El Niño is part of a broader phenomenon called El Niño-Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. It’s a recurring climate pattern involving changes in sea surface temperatures across the central and eastern tropical Pacific.

The phenomenon has three phases: the warm phase is El Niño, the cool phase is La Niña, and between the two lies a neutral or transitional phase, when neither dominates clearly. The changes occur in the tropical region of the Pacific Ocean, within 700 miles of the equator.

Previously, whale sharks had only been tagged by using a pole spear. The tag would last no longer than six months. But over the next 10 years, from 2015-25, the data from the new tags revealed previously unmapped movements of the whale sharks and helped highlight seamounts that are used as foraging sites and whale shark highways, which needed to be protected.

The team’s data are now being used by the Indonesian government to help establish a whale shark-based marine protected area in Saleh Bay this year. “The zoning considers critical habitats, including no-take zones that cover key whale shark areas [like] nursery or juvenile habitats as well as mangroves, which support prey availability, such as shrimp and [plankton],” says Putra, who is the focal species conservation senior manager at Konservasi Indonesia.

Per acre, these coastal plants can store up to 20x more carbon than forests on land. In fact, 93% of all the world's CO2 is stored in the ocean with the help of marine vegetation, algae, and coral, and losing just 1% of this ecosystem was equivalent to releasing the emissions of 97 million cars.

By continued extraction of fish out of our oceans, you are essentially deforesting our oceans. By not only removing the fish, but the act of removal, the methods of removal, are devastating to habitats, to ecosystems. And it's even more so there, because it's out of sight, out of mind.

Trawling was, by far, the most destructive form of fishing. The largest trawl nets are so big, they could swallow whole cathedrals, or up to 13 jumbo jet planes. The nets drag heavy weights at the bottom, scarring the seafloor that was once abundant with life, leaving nothing but a barren wasteland behind. This was just like bulldozing pristine Amazonian rainforest, except it was much, much worse.

Every year, approximately 25 million acres of forest are lost. This was equivalent to losing about 27 soccer fields per minute. However, bottom trawling wipes out an estimated 3.9 billion acres every year. This was equivalent to losing 4316 soccer fields every single minute. Tallied up across the year, this was equivalent to wiping out the land area of Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Turkey, Iran, Thailand, and Australia combined.

Where are the big environment groups? Why aren't they all over this like a rash? It's so obvious, it's just shouting in our faces: it is the fishing industry that is destroying the fish and the rest of the life in the seas. How much more obvious does it need to be? And yet, for the most part, they are silent; they're not speaking out against it; they are deliberately not engaging with the most important issue of all.

Bottom trawlers drag giant nets across the ocean floor, releasing stored CO2 and killing up to 75 percent of the marine life unintentionally caught up in the process.

A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the University of Queensland in Australia found that more than 70 percent of marine protected areas worldwide are contaminated by untreated, or poorly treated, wastewater.

According to the study, published this month in the journal Ocean & Coastal Management, more than 90 percent of coastal protected areas in the Coral Triangle are affected by high levels of sewage pollution—up to 10 times highter than in nearby unprotected waters.

The study

The news is that the state of a crucial oceanic circulation system has been reassessed by scientists. Some now believe that, as a result of climate breakdown changing the temperature and salinity of seawater, it is more likely than not to collapse. This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic.

Even when the countervailing effects of generalised global heating are taken into account, a further paper proposes, the net impact in northern Europe would be periods of extreme cold – including events in which temperatures in London fall to -19C, in Edinburgh to -30C and in Oslo to -48C.

A billionaire death cult has its fingers around humanity’s throat. It both causes and downplays our existential crisis. The oligarchs are not just a class enemy but, as they have always been, a societal enemy: a few thousand people can destroy civilisations. It’s the billions v the billionaires, and the stakes could not possibly be higher.

A decade ago, southern sea ice suddenly and dramatically declined. Scientists say the culprit was a "very violent release" of deep, pent-up heat.

The paper

"Using the wave flume facilities at CORL, we verified the reef's performance under extreme wave conditions relevant to coastal protection and examined how that performance changed as oysters colonized the structure over time," Mr. Geldard said.

"Designing these systems requires an interdisciplinary approach that integrates ecology, biology and coastal engineering to understand both ecological performance and impacts on waves, currents and sediment transport."

Researchers used the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Reefense program as a case study to show how interdisciplinary teams could address three core design priorities: shoreline protection, structural durability and cost-effectiveness.

Check out the open access paper..

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2516197123

Global efforts to restore oyster reefs and their services are accelerating (9). While many oyster reef restoration projects are primarily intended for habitat recovery or enhancing fisheries or water quality, an increasing number aim to provide coastal protection known as “living shorelines” (10). Living shorelines are one example of a nature-based solution, defined as actions that use natural processes and ecosystems to address societal challenges while delivering cobenefits for people and nature (11).

Oyster reef living shorelines often involve the placement of a fringing or breakwater reef substrate that is either naturally colonized by oysters or seeded with hatchery-reared spat in recruitment-limited systems (12). The capacity of oysters to adapt to climate-driven changes, such as sea level rise, is one benefit of living shorelines compared with conventional engineered coastal protection structures (13).

...

The integration of ecology and engineering in methods for coastal hazard management represents a paradigm shift in a field that has traditionally been delivered by engineers designing fixed structures, such as seawalls and breakwaters or, in more recent decades, by ecologists seeking to restore or rehabilitate biogenic habitats.

Indeed, there is evidence that living shoreline design and implementation are still occurring in a mostly siloed approach among disciplines, which has resulted in oyster reef living shorelines achieving either engineering or ecological goals, but not both (12, 16). Effective interdisciplinary collaboration is required to provide the technical guidance currently lacking for oyster reef living shorelines. Without this technical guidance, oyster reef living shorelines are generally not implemented at scale due to perceived risk or delivered by end users through a trial-and-error approach with higher likelihood of failure (17).

"It's estimated there are around 5,600 species in the CCZ [Clarion-Clipperton Zone], but around 90% of these are undescribed," explains Dr. Stewart. "As a result, there are thousands of potential species that have been discovered over the past decade just waiting to be named."

For years, the mining lobby has argued that the green transition is impossible without extracting cobalt, nickel, and manganese from the seafloor. This study finds that:

• Ambitious recycling could reduce the total demand for the nine key transition minerals by up to 45% by 2050. Recycling can reduce primary nickel demand by up to 48%

• A combination of factors including shifting from private car ownership to more public transport, smaller, more efficient EVs, and different battery choices, can reduce cumulative mineral demand by 23%

• The rise of advanced battery technology such as lithium iron phosphate batteries (which do not contain nickel or cobalt) can significantly reduce the demand for certain minerals

A concise briefing document is available here

The WhaleSpotter system leverages thermal imaging to reliably detect marine mammals in real time, day or night, and through light fog. The solution alerts crews to whales surfacing at distances of up to seven kilometers (four nautical miles), comparable to humans with binoculars during daylight. This provides ships and offshore operators more time and distance to adjust course or speed.

The expedition, which is expected to end February 14, is being led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology, which did not respond to a request for comment. It comes three months after the country signed an agreement with the United States to collaborate on securing a supply of critical minerals.

Japan’s foray into deep-sea mining comes amid mounting concern about the ecological cost of such technology. Scientists and environmental groups warn that marine extraction is racing ahead of our understanding of the impacted ecosystems. They are particularly concerned about sediment plumes, noise and light pollution, and damage to habitats and food webs, noting that scars left by equipment could render the seafloor uninhabitable for decades, even centuries.