A prominent 2019 study used ice cores in Antarctica to suggest that marine productivity in the North Atlantic had declined by 10% during the industrial era, with worrying implications that the trend might continue. But new research led by the University of Washington shows that marine phytoplankton — on which larger organisms throughout the marine ecosystem depend — may be more stable than believed in the North Atlantic.
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In spring of 2023, University of Washington undergraduates loaded a curious-looking, brightly-colored machine onto a boat and headed out into Puget Sound. The machine, an autonomous underwater vehicle known as a Seaglider, looked like a cross between a torpedo and a rocket ship, and would be tasked with collecting a variety of important data about our oceans. What’s more, this particular launch would represent the first successful deployment of a Seaglider by UW students.
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Ocean temperatures and their connections to weather trends have been making news. Five UW College of the Environment experts offer their perspectives on the current El Niño — a climate pattern in the tropical Pacific Ocean that affects weather worldwide. UW researchers comment on the current El Niño, its effect on weather in the Pacific Northwest, as well as on regional and global ocean temperature trends.
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Scientists and engineers from the UW School of Oceanography, Department of Earth and Space Sciences and the Applied Physics Lab, along with partners at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, recently were awarded more than $10 million to build an underwater observatory in the Cascadia subduction zone. The funding comes from the National Science Foundation and aligns with larger efforts to better understand subduction zones more broadly.
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How much can you really learn from a dead herring in a jar? Housed in the UW College of the Environment, the Burke Museum’s Ichthyology Collection is home to more than 13 million preserved fish specimens from around the world, many dating back over a century. By far the largest collection of its kind in North America, it includes over 300 different samples of Pacific herring — an ideal species for researchers aiming to look back in time.
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