Highlights Archive

The Washington/Oregon shelf, embedded in the Northern California Current System, is a productive habitat with important commercial fisheries. One of the most valuable species is Dungeness crab, which resides on the subsurface shelf and is sensitive...

Shelled pteropods, microscopic free-swimming sea snails, are widely regarded as indicators for ocean acidification because research has shown that their fragile shells are vulnerable to increasing ocean acidity. Sometimes called sea butterflies...

Ocean warming absorbs about 9/10th of the excess energy that is entering Earth’s climate system because of a build-up of man-made greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. That warming causes ocean expansion, contributing to sea level rise. Knowing how...

The magnitude 7.0 Haiti earthquake of 2010 ruptured a complex fault network including both strike-slip faults (where two blocks slide past one another) and reverse faults (in which the upper block, above the fault plane, moves up and over the lower...

NOAA’s 15th Arctic Report Card catalogs for 2020 the numerous ways that climate change continues to disrupt the polar region, with second-highest air temperatures and second-lowest summer sea ice driving a cascade of impacts, including the loss of...

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) in the Pacific Ocean has major worldwide social and economic consequences through its global scale effects on atmospheric and oceanic circulation, marine and terrestrial ecosystems, and other natural systems...

From spring to early fall in a typical year, NOAA and research partners conduct several important scientific surveys in the U.S. waters of the Bering and Chukchi Seas. Scientists collect oceanographic and biological data that are used to inform...

After 8 months of sitting on the seafloor, PMEL’s latest engineering development, the Flotation Controllable Ocean Mooring (FCOM) system successfully resurfaced in July. Over the last two years, PMEL has been developing a profiling mooring for use in...

With annual revenues up to $220 million, the Dungeness crab (Metacarcinus magister) is one of the most valuable commercial fisheries on the US West Coast. Yet, rapid intensification of ocean acidification (OA) along the US West Coast is reducing...

The surface mooring at the Kuroshio Extension Observatory (KEO), which broke away from its anchor on May 19, was recovered on July 21 by the Japanese charter ship, Kaiyo. Despite being caught in eddies and an ocean jet, the drifting KEO buoy, its...

Today, NOAA unveiled its new 10-year research roadmap to help the nation’s scientists, resource managers, and coastal communities address acidification of the open ocean, coasts, and Great Lakes. 

The research plan sets out three major objectives...

The sei whale is a large baleen whale, in the same genus as the blue whale, found in most of the world's oceans outside the Arctic. From 2009 to 2014, we searched acoustically for sei whales off the northeast coast of Greenland on the edge of the...

The ocean is the flywheel that propels the climate system, storing huge amounts of heat and carbon in a vast reservoir that covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface. Measuring changes in that heat content over time has been a subject of intense...

PMEL Acoustics Program and Engineering Development Division participated as part of a memorandum of understanding between NOAA and Caladan providing subject matter expertise on pressure sensors and acoustics during the June mission in the Mariana...

Three saildrones left Alameda, California in May and have arrived at Unimak Pass in Alaska’s remote Aleutian Islands. The ocean drones have sailed nearly 2,700 miles at a walking pace, about 2.5 miles per hour (2 knots), which is just about the...

The US Arctic and Bering Sea are big, remote, and harsh environments. PMEL's Innovative Technology for Arctic Exploration program and Engineering Development Division have been developing autonomous technologies and tools to collect critical data to...