Water science news, explainers, and statistics covering freshwater, hydrology, lakes, rivers, groundwater, ice, and Earth’s connected water systems.
Europe’s biggest inland waters gather across a broad northern arc, where ice sheets once pressed into the land and major rivers later became routes for dams. The scale is easy to miss from shore. Lake Ladoga alone covers about 17,700 square kilometers, an expanse larger than many people picture when they hear the word lake.…
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Plastic pollution reaches far beyond a bottle floating near shore. Pieces drift across open water, settle into seafloor mud, wash onto beaches and break into fragments smaller than a grain of rice. That spread makes a single global total difficult to calculate. The most careful answer is a range of measurements for different parts of…
Researchers at the Second Institute of Oceanography report that the season of a marine heatwave can strongly shape the ocean’s productivity response. Their study, published July 9 in Communications Earth & Environment, maps a sharper split across the Southern Hemisphere during austral summer. Warm spells were linked with lower net primary production in low and…
NOAA Ocean Exploration’s July 9 announcement opens a larger window onto life far below the ocean surface. The agency has placed biological occurrence annotations from NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer expeditions into the Ocean Biodiversity Information System, called OBIS and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, or GBIF. The July release brings observations and samples from three…
