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Showing 9 of 235 news items in Ocean & Biodiversity

Ocean & BiodiversityNovember 13, 2025

Main driver of Sargassum blooms in the Atlantic Ocean revealed

Photo credit: Arkadij Schell via Phys.org Excerpt from phys.org By the beginning of June this year, approximately 38 million tons of Sargassum drifted towards the coasts of the Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico, and northern South America, marking a negative record. Especially during the summer months, the brown algae accumulate on beaches, decomposing and emitting a foul odor. This not only repels tourists but also threatens coastal ecosystems. In the open ocean, Sargassum seaweed floating on the surface serves as nourishment and habitat for numerous marine species.

Ocean & BiodiversityNovember 10, 2025

Documentary gives voice to the women of the sea in the Azores to protect the ocean.

Photo credit: Ricardo Nogueira via SAPO.pt Excerpt from sapo.pt The documentary 'Women of the Sea - Azores' brings together the voices of 49 Azorean women with a "deep emotional connection" to the ocean, aiming to highlight the role of women and raise awareness about the protection of marine biodiversity. "We are seeing more and more women working at sea, developing businesses, providing training, and involved in technological and scientific development. The project ultimately gives women a voice. Women are naturally caregivers, and we need to take care of our ocean," filmmaker Raquel Clemente Martins explained to the Lusa news agency. The documentary, which features the voices of 49 women and involved a total of 71 women from the Azores, will be screened on November 7th at the Pavilhão do Conhecimento (Knowledge Pavilion) in Lisbon, during the National Ocean Literacy Conference, after having premiered on Faial Island in July.

Ocean & BiodiversityNovember 10, 2025

Has climate change brought mosquitoes to Iceland?

Excerpt from aljazeera.com Mosquitoes were detected in Iceland for the first time this month, resulting in the country losing its status as one of the only places in the world without them. The findings were confirmed by the country’s national science institute on Monday.

Ocean & BiodiversityNovember 2, 2025

Pacific protesters against deep sea mining challenge US exploration ship

Photo credit: Robin Hammond / Greenpeace via AsiaPacificReport.nz Excerpt from asiapacificreport.nz Cook Islanders holding a banner reading “Don’t Mine the Moana” have confronted an exploration vessel as it returned to Rarotonga port today, protesting the emerging threat of seabed mining. Four activists in kayaks paddled alongside the Nautilus, which has spent the last three weeks on a US-funded research expedition surveying mineral nodule fields around the Cook Islands in partnership with the Cook Islands government. The Nautilus expedition comes just six months after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to expedite deep sea mining, tasking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fast track the licensing process.

Ocean & BiodiversityNovember 2, 2025

American Samoa says no to deep-sea mining. The Trump administration might do it anyway.

Photo credit: David Briscoe / Associated Press via ICTNews.org Excerpt from ictnews.org In early August, in the village of Utulei on the eastern shore of Tatuila, the largest of seven islands that make up American Samoa, more than two dozen local residents gathered in an auditorium. They were there to learn about a proposal to allow deep-sea mining across more than 18 million acres of their surrounding waters in the Pacific Ocean. President Donald Trump had issued an executive order to jump-start the nascent deep-sea mining industry three months earlier. Within weeks, the U.S. Department of the Interior began asking for public input on leasing the seabed surrounding American Samoa, and the territorial government organized a series of meetings to help educate the public on what to expect.

Ocean & BiodiversityOctober 27, 2025

Scientists hope underwater fiber-optic cables can help save endangered orcas

Excerpt from pressdemocrat.com SAN JUAN ISLAND, Wash. (AP) — As dawn broke over San Juan Island, a team of scientists stood on the deck of a barge and unspooled over a mile of fiber-optic cable into the frigid waters of the Salish Sea. Working by headlamp, they fed the line from the rocky shore down to the seafloor — home to the region’s orcas. The bet is that the same hair-thin strands that carry internet signals can be transformed into a continuous underwater microphone to capture the clicks, calls and whistles of passing whales — information that could reveal how they respond to ship traffic, food scarcity and climate change. If the experiment works, the thousands of miles of fiber-optic cables that already crisscross the ocean floor could be turned into a vast listening network that could inform conservation efforts worldwide. The technology, called Distributed Acoustic Sensing, or DAS, was developed to monitor pipelines and detect infrastructure problems. Now University of Washington scientists are adapting it to listen to the ocean. Unlike traditional hydrophones that listen from a single spot, DAS turns the entire cable into a sensor, allowing it to pinpoint the exact location of an animal and determine the direction it’s heading.

Ocean & BiodiversityOctober 27, 2025

First 'climate tipping point' being crossed: Coral reefs in crisis, is there still a way back?

Excerpt from aa.com.tr What scientists once warned as a possibility has now become a reality. Warm-water coral reefs, among the planet’s most vital ecosystems, are crossing a "climate tipping point," according to the Global Tipping Points Report 2025. Authored by 160 scientists from 23 countries and 87 institutions, the report, released last week, serves as a stark wake-up call to a world distracted by daily crises and forgetting the tangible reality of global warming. It warned that “the world has entered a new reality,” with ecosystems nearing dangerous thresholds as global heating is set to soon surpass the 1.5C limit. The prospect of interconnected tipping points pushing humanity toward an irreversible climate crisis has immediately sparked questions about what these thresholds mean for the planet and whether they could mark the beginning of the end.

Ocean & BiodiversityOctober 13, 2025

The Azores are highlighted at COP30 for their leadership in preserving seas and oceans.

Excerpt from diariodosacores.pt The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) will take place from November 10th to 21st in Belém, Brazil. Delegations from over 190 countries are expected, most of them signatories to the Paris Agreement, and over 50,000 participants from various organizations, NGOs, and civil society. At the invitation of the COP30 Presidency, the Azores reaffirm their international leadership in ocean and coastal restoration and occupy a prominent position in the delegation from Portugal, a member of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). Diário dos Açores learned about the Azorean mission to COP30 in an exclusive interview with Bernardo Brito e Abreu, advisor to the President of the Government of the Azores with the Ministry of the Sea and Fisheries, and Adriano Quintela, a biologist with a PhD in Geography from the University of the Azores. Both work in the Blue Azores Program, providing government coordination and operational and information management, respectively.

Ocean & BiodiversityOctober 13, 2025

WTO Fisheries Subsidy Ban Takes Effect — What It Means for Tonga

Excerpt from tongaindependent.com The global fight against overfishing reached a milestone this week as the World Trade Organisation’s (WTO) landmark Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies officially came into force. The deal, first adopted in 2022, became binding on Monday after Kenya, Brazil, Tonga, and Vietnam formally ratified it, bringing the total approvals to 112—just over the two-thirds threshold needed from the WTO’s 166 members. This marks the WTO’s first-ever environmental agreement, obliging governments to cut subsidies that encourage illegal fishing and the exploitation of waters already classified as overfished.