New bathymetric map of the western Gulf of Alaska. New seafloor maps show for the first time the course of ancient ice masses. They show how they shaped essential habitat for the western Gulf of Alaska’s abundant fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. Scientists wove together historical and modern data—from century-old hand-drawn charts to modern multibeam surveys. They created […]
Seattle — Trident Seafoods Corporation, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Environmental Protection Agency have reached an agreement to resolve violations of the Clean Water Act for discharges of fish waste at two seafood processing facilities in Sand Point and Wrangell, Alaska. Under the agreement, Trident will remove nearly three-and-a-half acres of waste from […]
A sensor array off the Pacific Northwest coast has captured the cracking, bulging and shaking from the eruption of Axial Seamount, a nearly mile-high undersea volcano, in more detail than ever before. A series of papers published this week in the journals Science and Geophysical Research Letters — and announced today during a press conference […]
In a new study, they also detailed how remnants of the oil, black carbon from burning oil slicks and contaminants from drilling mud combined with microscopic algae and other marine debris to descend in a “dirty blizzard” to the seafloor. The work, published May 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, confirms […]
Shelikof Strait, in the Gulf of Alaska, is an important spawning area for walleye pollock, the target of the largest—and one of the most valuable—fisheries in the nation. This year, a team of NOAA Fisheries scientists went there to turn their usual view of the fishery upside-down. Scientists have been conducting fish surveys in the […]
DURHAM, N.H. Research led by a University of New Hampshire professor has identified a new source of methane for gas — hydrates ice-like substances found in sediment that trap methane within the crystal structure of frozen water — in the Arctic Ocean. The findings, published online now in the May 2015 journal Geology, point to […]
Off the West Coast of the United States, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water. Researchers found that water off the […]