Sharks were a tolerant bunch some 50 million years ago, cruising an Arctic Ocean that contained about the same percentage of freshwater as Louisiana's Lake Ponchatrain does today, says a new study. The study indicates the Eocene Arctic sand tiger shark, a member of the lamniform group of sharks that includes today's great white, thresher and mako sharks, was thriving in the brackish water of the western Arctic Ocean back then. In contrast, modern sand tiger sharks living today in the Atlantic Ocean are very intolerant of low salinity, requiring three times the saltiness of the Eocene sharks in order to survive....

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The Malaspina Expedition, led by the Spanish National Research Council, has demonstrated that there are five large accumulations of plastic debris in the open ocean that match with the five major twists of oceanic surface water circulation. In addition to the known accumulation of plastic waste in the North Pacific, there are similar accumulations in the central North Atlantic, the South Pacific, the South Atlantic and the Indian Ocean....

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Setting effective conservation policies requires near real-time knowledge of environmental conditions. Scientists propose using genetic techniques as a low-cost, quick way to collect such data....

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Long-term studies have revealed obvious changes in the North Sea’s biota. Studies during the past twenty years indicate that southern species increasingly expand northward. The Atlantic cod is drawn to cooler regions, while crustaceans from southern areas spread ever farther into the North Sea. The effects of the climate change can be clearly felt on the German sea coasts, as well....

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Scientists studying Emperor penguin populations across Antarctica finds the iconic animals in danger of dramatic declines by the end of the century due to climate change. Their study finds the Emperor penguin 'fully deserving of endangered status due to climate change.'...

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Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere cause warming not only at high latitudes but also across tropical regions, according to new research. "These results confirm what climate models have long predicted -- that although greenhouse gases cause greater warming at the poles they also cause warming in the tropics. Such findings indicate that few places on Earth will be immune to global warming and that the tropics will likely experience associated climate impacts, such as increased tropical storm intensity," the project leader said....

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Researchers have discovered a widely distributed group of marine bacteria that produce compounds nearly identical to toxic human-made fire retardants....

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Scientists are expecting an average, but still large, hypoxic or "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico this year, and slightly above-average hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay .

NOAA-supported modeling is forecasting this year's Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone to cover an area ranging from about 4,633 to 5,708 square miles, or about the size of the state of Connecticut.

A second NOAA-funded forecast, for the Chesapeake Bay, predicts a slightly larger than average dead zone in the nation's largest estuary.

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New research has provided a major new theory on the cause of the ice age that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere 2.6 million years ago....

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Researchers have found that the deep ocean currents that move heat around the globe stalled or even stopped about 950,000 years ago, possibly due to expanding ice cover in the north. The slowing currents increased carbon dioxide storage in the ocean, leaving less in the atmosphere, which kept temperatures cold and kicked the climate system into a new phase of colder but less frequent ice ages, they hypothesize....

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