Socioecology Research Today

William Shakespeare is “a poet who enjoins us to go to water” (200). Yet ecocritics have largely ignored his invitation, Dan Brayton argues, preferring landlocked green spaces—a condition known as “chlorophilia” (37)—over the salty substance that covers almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. Combating this “terrestrial bias” (18), along with “the mythology of the timeless [...]

Biomass burning produces 40 to 250 million tons of charcoal per year worldwide. Much of this is preserved in soils and sediments for thousands of years. However, the estimated production rate of charcoal is significantly larger than that of decomposition, and researchers have calculated that a large fraction of the charcoal produced by fires is [...]

The addition of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere caused by fossil fuel burning and other anthropogenic activity has caused temperatures at the surface of Earth to increase significantly over the past century and a half, and rapidly during the interval from around 1975 until the early years of the 21st century. However, sea surface and [...]

Liquid Robotics is betting that autonomous vehicles will emerge as the best way to troll the oceans to gather data. The Silicon Valley-based company yesterday raised $45 million in a series E round to grow the company’s sales and services around what it calls “high-value ocean data services” in research, defense, and oil and gas [...]

Do bacterial taxa demonstrate clear endemism, like macroorganisms, or can one site’s bacterial community recapture the total phylogenetic diversity of the world’s oceans? Here we compare a deep bacterial community characterization from one site in the English Channel (L4-DeepSeq) with 356 datasets from the International Census of Marine Microbes (ICoMM) taken from around the globe [...]

Polymetallic nodules form over thousands of years on the sea floor, through processes that are still not fully understood; most nodules range in size from the diameter of a golf ball to that of a large potato. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, various companies explored the possibility of harvesting them — but as metal [...]

Japan said Tuesday that it had extracted gas from offshore deposits of methane hydrate — sometimes called “flammable ice” —a breakthrough that officials and experts said could be a step toward tapping a promising but still little-understood energy source.

Marine debris has been found in marine animals since the early 20th century, but little is known about the impacts of the ingestion of debris in large marine mammals. In this study we describe a case of mortality of a sperm whale related to the ingestion of large amounts of marine debris in the Mediterranean [...]

We present results that improve the estimates of the global net sea-to-air flux, global oceanic emission, global oceanic uptake, and partial atmospheric lifetime of methyl chloride (CH3Cl) with respect to oceanic loss. This study includes improved parameterizations for solubility and saturation anomaly-sea surface temperature relationships for CH3Cl, along with the use of an updated gas [...]

After recent events in Japan and the Indian Ocean, the world is alert to the risk posed by earthquake-generated tsunamis. A team of scientists are now seeking to understand a rarer type of tsunami caused by huge underwater landslides, and determine whether climate change might affect their frequency. Project leader Peter Talling, of the National [...]