Hydrodynamics plays an important role in both planktonic and benthic communities in the coastal ocean. Fluid flow controls the transport and mixing of biologically important material and regulates ecosystem functions such as nutrient uptake and benthic grazing. Here, we will address the connections between physical and biological processes on coral reefs over a wide range of scales, from millimeters to kilometers.

Scientists around the world are closing in on some dirty truths about carbon emissions and climate change.

A cover-up is plainly involved; it’s not about scandal but dirt itself. That means soil, the upper layer of earth typically a few feet but sometimes 10 feet or more thick, usually black or dark brown. Below is rock or other material that contains little of the organic matter, derived mainly from plants, that gives good farmland its fertility.

A new international study may answer contentious questions about the onset and persistence of Earth’s Little Ice Age, a period of widespread cooling that lasted for hundreds of years until the late 19th century.

As a boy in coastal San Diego in the 1980s, Jim Randerson loved the exotic fish, birds and even tides of red crustaceans that washed ashore during storms created by temperature changes in far-off seas. Across the globe, Yang Chen was a child in rural southeast China witnessing the pollution created by new manufacturing and power plants.

“I actually grew up at the same time that China was opening up and expanding. I saw the factories being built – and the effects on air and water,” he says.

A team of US scientists found there was a correlation between El Nino patterns in the Pacific and fire activity in the eastern Amazon.

Writing in the journal Science, they say they also found a link between Atlantic SST changes and fires in southern areas of South America.

They said the data could help produce forecasts of forthcoming fire seasons.