Oceans

Science News for Students articles on oceans

  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. Earth

    Nature’s coast guards

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

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  8. Environment

    Home, plastic home

    Some ocean life is moving into floating piles of plastic trash.

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  9. Animals

    Motion in the ocean

    Scientists figure out why pulsing corals pulse.

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  10. Earth

    Ahead of the wave

    Scientists are working to predict — and tame — the tsunamis that can threaten some coastal communities

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  11. Climate

    Explainer: El Niño and La Niña

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  12. Climate

    Climate’s troublesome kids

    The recurring climate events El Niño and La Niña trigger long-lived changes to weather around the world.

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