Oceans

Science News for Students articles on oceans

  1. Environment

    Deep-sea fish show signs of exposure to pollution

    A new study suggests deep-water fish may have health problems linked to human pollution. Eating these fish may expose diners to the same pollution.

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  2. Earth

    What sent Hawaii’s mountain chain east?

    A single shaft of spewing hot rock created an enormously long chain of mostly undersea mountains in the western Pacific. That chain takes an unexpected eastern curve. The reason, scientists now think, may be a gobbled-up tectonic plate.

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  3. Microbes

    Life’s ultra-slow lane is deep beneath the sea

    Biologists had suspected the deep seafloor would be little more than barren sediment. But they found a surprising amount of oxygen — and life.

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  4. Earth

    Ancient ocean linked to supercontinent’s breakup

    The supercontinent Pangaea started breaking apart 200 million years ago. This may have been triggered by the shrinking of the Tethys Ocean, a new study finds.

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  5. Climate

    Fast sea level rise is a very recent change

    Sea levels have been rising for more than a century. But that rise is now speeding up. That suggests that what is driving the rise — climate change — also has increased dramatically in recent years.

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  6. Environment

    Plastics at sea create raft of problems

    About 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic float in the world's oceans, a new study finds. That's a problem. This 269,000 tons of plastic can choke, entangle and poison a wide variety of sea creatures.

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  7. Animals

    Teen shows salty lionfish are getting fresh

    Lauren Arrington kept spotting lionfish in rivers near her Florida home. Her science fair project probed how much fresh water these ocean fish could stand — and led to a published research paper.

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  8. Oceans

    Digging a trench to stop a tsunami

    Boyd Kane built his own wave tank to study tsunamis and how he might change the seafloor to stop their advance.

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  9. Earth

    Mining metals amidst seafloor animals

    Miners may need to get their feet — and everything else — wet as they carefully seek out loads of copper and other valuable natural resources.

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  10. Earth

    Hacking the planet

    The big backup plan: Scientists reluctantly consider altering Earth’s climate to head off the catastrophic effects of global warming.

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  11. Microbes

    Mystery microbes of the sea

    Biologists find archaea a true curiosity. They make up one of life’s three main branches. The two better known branches are bacteria and eukaryotes (u KARE ee oatz). That last branch includes animals, plants and fungi. But archaea have remained mysterious. Very little is known about them. In fact, their unique status wasn’t even recognized until relatively recently, in 1977.

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  12. Earth

    Nature’s coast guards

    Barrier islands aren’t just for beach vacations — they protect coasts from storms and flooding.

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