The discharge could release a number of radioactive isotopes into the Pacific Ocean, critics say. Despite outcry from local leaders and the Japanese public and warnings from environmental campaigners, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority on Wednesday gave its approval for a plan to discharge contaminated water from Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, a move […]
For Teacher Appreciation Week, we highlight the dedicated educators who inspire stewardship of Alaska’s ocean and watersheds. NOAA’s Ocean Guardian Program works with schools throughout the country to promote the conservation of local watersheds, the ocean, and places like national marine sanctuaries. Each school creates local projects to create environmentally sustainable events and programs that benefit the […]
Alaska’s coastal waters are some of the most commercially valuable and productive ecosystems on the planet. Ocean acidification—a decrease in ocean pH caused by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide—is expected to impact these ecosystems, but very little is known about how it could alter nearshore environments. Nearshore ecosystems provide habitat and serve as a nursery […]
A science cruise led by a University of Alaska Fairbanks researcher to investigate the origin of the Arctic Ocean’s Amerasia Basin has come to an end, with the research vessel Sikuliaq back at Nome after more than seven weeks at sea. The voyage was the Sikuliaq’s northernmost to date. It sailed to just over 79 degrees […]
In a decision that sparked condemnation from environmental advocates, fisherfolk, and neighboring countries, Japan announced Tuesday a plan to dump over 1.2 million tons of stored contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean. The decision made by Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s Cabinet gives Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) the green light […]
The Alsek, a world-class rafting river that flows into the Gulf of Alaska from its headwaters in Canada, may soon abandon the lower part of its drainage for a steeper one 15 miles away. The Alsek River starts in the Yukon Territory, flows through British Columbia and then on to Dry Bay in Alaska. It […]
The American blue economy, which are resources and services provided by the oceans, contributed about $373 billion to the economy in 2018, and fisheries play a large role in that. Climate change, however, threatens commercial and recreational fisheries; changes in water temperature can affect the environments where fish, shellfish, and other marine species live, and cause them […]
SOLOMONS, MD (November 11, 2020)–Arctic researchers Jacqueline Grebmeier and Lee Cooper have been visiting the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska for nearly 30 years, collecting information about the biological diversity of the watery world under the sea ice to understand how marine ecosystems are responding to environmental changes. This year, a late-season research cruise […]
The impacts of predator loss and climate change are combining to devastate living reefs that have defined Alaskan kelp forests for centuries, according to new research published in Science. “We discovered that massive limestone reefs built by algae underpin the Aleutian Islands’ kelp forest ecosystem,” said Douglas Rasher, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for […]