Together with colleagues from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute, Senckenberg scientists Serena Abel and Angelika Brandt examined sediment samples from the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench for the presence of microplastics. In their study, which was recently published in Environmental Pollution, the researchers show that 1 […]
In a remote area of northwest Greenland, an international team of scientists has made a stunning discovery, buried beneath a kilometer of ice. It’s a meteor impact crater, 300 meters deep and bigger than Paris or the Beltway around Washington, DC. It is one of the 25 largest […]
Sharks are some of the animal kingdom’s most feared hunters, thanks to a special sixth sense. There are two ways that animals use electroreception. They either use their own electric currents and sense how those currents bounce back to interpret their surroundings. Or they pick up the electric […]
Scientists have new evidence that Earth’s many periodic mass extinctions follow a cycle of about 27 million years, connecting the five major mass extinctions with more minor ones occurring throughout Earth’s life-fostering timespan. The artificial intelligence analysis could also shift how evolutionary scientists think about the aftermath of mass […]
A team of researchers understands more about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle plume, rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath central Greenland that melts the ice from below. Greenland and Iceland are connected through these plumes! […]
China’s new deep-sea manned submersible Fendouzhe (Striver) returned to south China’s Hainan Province on Saturday morning onboard the scientific research ship Tansuo-1, after completing its ocean expedition. Fendouzhe set a national record by diving to a depth of 10,909 meters in the Mariana Trench at 8:12 a.m. on […]
For the first time, scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have formally identified a new species of undersea creature based solely on high-definition video footage captured at the bottom of the ocean. And what an undersea creature it is. Meet Duobrachium sparksae – a strange, gelatinous species […]
After an almost complete absence for over half a century, Antarctic blue whales are returning in numbers to the waters surrounding South Georgia island in the south Atlantic. An international team led by Susannah Calderan of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) has collected 58 sightings of the giant […]
Even if humanity stopped emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, Earth will warm for centuries to come and oceans will rise by metres, according to a controversial modelling study published Thursday. Natural drivers of global warming — more heat-trapping clouds, thawing permafrost, and shrinking sea ice — already set in […]
Every year, sea ice cover in the Arctic Ocean shrinks to a low point in mid-September. This year it measures just 1.44 million square miles (3.74 million square km), the second-lowest value in the 42 years since satellites began taking measurements. The ice today covers only 50% of the area it […]