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If you're a shark, what could you possibly have to fear? You're the ultimate predator, the top of the marine food chain. You can swim around without a care in the world... unless another, even bigger shark is feeling hungry. More »
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The Pacific Ocean's Mariana trench is so deep, it could accomodate the entirety of Mt. Everest with thousands of meters to spare. Now, the most precise measurements of the trench to date indicate that it's even deeper than we once thought. More »
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As global temperatures rise and the oceans heat up, a huge question is how fish that are adapted to one set of temperatures will survive this upheaval. Now we know at least one species could adapt fast enough to survive. More »
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Where Earth got its oceans is a big question, and the currently preferred explanation is that ancient comets brought in huge amounts of water from the outer solar system. That hypothesis just received some big evidence to back it up. More »
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The Salish Sea has been depositing some gruesome things on the shores of Washington and British Columbia. Single feet (and a few pairs) keep washing up on these cold, rainy beaches. Find out how many incidents there have been over the past five years, why it's always feet, and why they wash up on this particular coastline. More »
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This map is the result of one very busy month of data collected by NASA's Aquarius instrument, offering the first ever global map of the ocean surface's saltiness. This information has potentially profound implications for our understanding of changing climates. More »
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The last decade was the hottest on record, and yet it wasn't until 2010 that an individual year was hotter than the record-breaking 1998 heatwave. Somehow, global temperatures mysteriously flattened out. The explanation may lie thousands of feet underwater. More »
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Around 2.4 billion years ago, the ancestors of bacteria took over the oceans and began photosynthesizing, creating massive amounts of oxygen where before there had been barely any. This was the Great Oxygenation Event, which made all subsequent life on Earth possible. All life except . . . yeast. More »
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It's hard to know where to begin when calculating the effects that climate change might have on our planet, but I'm guessing most people haven't considered the smell factor. Global warming could super-charge the production of a particularly smelly gas. More »
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The fact that sea levels are rising probably won't come as a huge surprise. But we now have some much-needed historical context for the melting icecaps and rising waters...and there's zero doubt that, in geological history, higher sea levels meant higher temperatures. More »
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The popular wisdom is that no one can drown in the Dead Sea because they'll float on the super-salty waters. That's wrong, but it's true that drownings in the Dead Sea are different from drowning deaths in ordinary waters. More »
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We know that Saturn's moon Titan is home to everything from ice volcanoes to methane lakes to possibly even very simple forms of life. But its biggest secret is still hidden from sight: a giant subterranean ocean, possibly of water. More »
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This is an illustration of a giant cuttlefish battling brave sailors, depicted in a popular science book from 1872, called The Ocean World, by Louis Figuier. And that's not the least of the weirdness that lurks in Figuier's book. More »
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In unholy-army-of-the-night news, scientists have a new way to turn swarming beasts of the sea into unreasoning killers. Nothing is safe from their merciless aggression. Not . . . even . . . you. More »
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Despite what you may have heard, it doesn't make water go down the drain one direction or the other. But it does have an effect: The Coriolis Effect can turn ships off course and change the weather. More »
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Red may have featured Helen Mirren firing a gatling gun, but the film wasn't indicative of Warren Ellis' work as a whole. Here are 10 amazing tales from Ellis' oeuvre about such topics as transhuman deities and a dead Galactus. More »
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If you haven't heard of Mavericks, that's because it's a tiny beach on the Northern California coast. But scientists and surfers know it well, because it delivers some of the most spectacularly huge waves in the world. Find out why. More »
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Every year, the average sperm whale poops out 50 metric tons of iron, an amount equal to 30.3 2009 Hyundai Accents. These ferrous feces nourish phytoplankton at the ocean's surface, which in turn absorb CO2 for photosynthesis. More »
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Did you know that the entire Earth is being ripped out from under us? Or that the Earth's tides are like a massive, cosmic game of juggling? Find out more after the jump! More »
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The webzine Crossed Genres has started a new blog, Science In My Fiction, aimed at encouraging people to put real science into their storytelling. And the first post asks what'll happen when we recognize dolphins as people. More »
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We all know carbon emissions are making our planet warmer. But the increase in carbon brings with it other surprising problems. More carbon apparently means low sounds travel farther underwater, making the ocean a noisier place to live and work. More »
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The International Space Station has given humanity a foothold in space; should we have an equivalent station rounding Earth's oceans? A team is currently working to make their floating oceanographic laboratory a watery reality. More »
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Click to viewAt the same time as Paraguay is drying up, Africa is ripping open, a slow process that will result in the emergence of a whole new ocean, according to Scientific American. The rip you see above can't be resewn — as Eitan Haddock's photographs document. Last year, scientists watched an 8 meter rip in the earth appear in only three weeks. Change is nothing new for this part of the world: researchers recently revealed that the Sahara was entirely covered in vegetation at many points during the last 120,000 years. Watch an ocean appear before your disbelieving eyes, after the jump. More »
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If you've ever seen the original Godzilla movie from 1954, you know that the heroic scientists deploy a weapon called the "oxygen destroyer" (pictured) that sucks all oxygen from the water and suffocates the Big G. Now it turns out that weapon isn't as ridiculous as you thought: In fact, scientists have identified countless "oxygen dead zones" in the oceans created rapidly by chemicals and plants that suck air out of the water. Once oxygen has been leeched from the water — usually close to shore — any ocean life larger than microbes is a goner. More »
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United Nations weapon inspectors have found way more than they bargained for during a routine inspection. That may sound like the beginning of a "torn from headlines" plot from your average episode of Law & Order: International Politics Unit. But when you add in that the weapon inspections are happening on one of Jupiter's moons and that the "more than they expect" turns out to be long-buried artifacts from a dead alien civilization, suddenly you have the basis for Ocean, a comic from the mind of Warren "Transmetropolitan" Ellis. Now it's being made into a movie from the people who brought you 300. Spoilers ahead. More »
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This is a new low, even for life on Earth — geologists have found bacteria living 1.6 kilometers beneath the ocean floor, twice as deep as ever recorded before. The simple bugs (one cell pictured, at the end of the arrow) are related to the ones found at deep sea hydrothermal vents, but they represent a stunning new discovery in that they open up the possibility that as much as 2/3 of all the biomass on Earth could be buried beneath its surface. It also strengthens the possibility that life on other planets could be hiding out, just waiting to be found. More »
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The so-called Freedom Ship, a floating city of thousands, is an idea that has been tossed around for a while. Now the Freedom Ship company has a new set of designs for the floating urban space, which looks sort of like a giant mall parking lot, and sort of like a really giant Love Boat. Here you can see the new design of the ship. The designers estimate they'll have it built in three years. Here are some of the specs on this giant ship city. More »
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We just told you about how Host 2, the sequel to last year's awesome giant-pollution-monster movie from Korea, would have multiple cool monsters. Well, here's one of 'em, from the first Host. Top this, Cloverfield weenies! If your monster were this cool, I bet you wouldn't be afraid to show it before the flick comes out. More »
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Antigrav will give us flying cars, but more importantly it'll reinvent jetski technology. These seacraft hoverpods look sexier than those pod racers in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Plus you could zip up onto the beach and spray sand in the face of the jock who bullied you during high school. More »
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Too bad we have to smash the polar ice to understand it. A new ship being built by the European Science Federation will be able to drill through thousands of miles of ocean under the ice and collect core samples from the sea floor. The Aurora Borealis will be the first ship that can break ice in all four directions, and drill down simultaneously. The only challenge: Figuring out who's responsible when the shit hits the polar bear. More »
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