Ocean science news, explainers, and statistics covering marine environments, currents, climate, coasts, seafloor research, and the changing global ocean.
The International Hydrographic Organization maintains a standard for naming and dividing oceans and seas. That standard helps explain why 11 countries can be counted as having Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The answer includes shorelines on Atlantic-connected seas such as the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Baltic Sea and Black Sea. Geography makes the count less obvious…
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The NOAA Ocean Service describes one connected body of seawater divided into five named ocean basins. The Pacific comes first and the Arctic comes last. The Atlantic, Indian and Southern oceans occupy the middle places. For a consistent comparison, every area below follows the same archived World Factbook five-basin convention. It treats the named open-ocean…
A 2025 NOAA analysis in Global Biogeochemical Cycles found signs that ocean acidification is changing a feedback in the global carbon cycle. The result matters because the sea absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, stores part of it for long periods and helps slow the buildup of heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. That work shines…
NOAA describes hypoxia as water with too little dissolved oxygen to support many marine animals. In coastal areas, this oxygen loss can create an ocean dead zone, a stretch of water where fish move away and many animals living on the seafloor struggle to survive. The change often begins far upstream, where rain carries excess…
