Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research
The open access journal Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research (OLAR), published in association with SML, publishes technologically innovative research in marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric studies and the interactions among them.
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Our title for this editorial—the “science we need for the ocean we want”—comes from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission [1]. We fully endorse that the future of ocean management depends on the highest quality of science that is possible. Globally, recognition is growing for the need to better protect and manage the oceans from the threats posed by climate change, ocean acidification, nutrient pollution, harmful algal blooms, overfishing, and sea-floor mining. In early March of this year, negotiators at the United Nations agreed on final language for a treaty on ocean biodiversity, building on the COP15 for biodiversity held in Montreal in December 2022. If enacted by a majority of the world’s countries, as seems likely, this treaty would create massive marine protected areas covering 30% of the ocean area by 2030. The focus is on waters beyond the territorial boundaries of nations, a region now subject to very little protection or oversight.
The upper ocean heat content in the equatorial Pacific usually serves as a primary precursor for an upcoming El Niño, while strong atmospheric perturbations such as westerly wind burst and easterly wind surge sometimes play a decisive role in determining ...
The mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is important to global sea-level change. The AIS loses mass mainly through basal melting and subsequent calving of the Antarctic ice shelves. However, the simulated basal melting rates are very uncertain ...
Water temperature is one of the most important factors that affect the occurrence of harmful algal blooms (HABs). Characteristics of sea surface temperature (SST) variability related to a Noctiluca scintillans bloom were analyzed with Himawari-8 data in ...
The current climate change episode has impacted sea ice in the 2 polar regions differently. In the Arctic, remarkable sea ice extent and thickness declines have been observed with a stunning depletion rate of old ice. No similar changes have been observed ...
Antarctic sea ice extent dropped to its lowest level in 45 years of satellite observations on 2023 February 21, the second year in a row with an area below 2 million km2. This occurrence raises the question of whether the recent change in Antarctic sea ...
Fig. 1. (A) The first discovery of the whale fall of Stenella longirostris on the Zhongnan seamount in the South China Sea in March 2020. Some megafauna observed at the dolphin fall during April–June 2020: (B) Munidopsis sp., (C) caridean shrimp, (D) sea urchin, (E) lithodid crab, (F) snailfish, (G) grenadier, (H) cusk-eel, and (I) Halosauridae sp.Fig. 2. The images of the 3 dead cow bodies on the slope of the Zhongnan seamount in the South China Sea after over 100 d: (A) 650-m cow body in 24 h, showing half of the body tissue bitten away; (B) the 650-m cow body in early July 2021; (C) the 1,600-m body; and (D) the 3,400-m body in early July 2021.Whale falls are a recent discovery of a new type of ecosystem in the deep sea with communities and succession that are different from other known ecosystems. They represent unique biodiversity hotspots supporting numerous marine organisms in a small area over a relatively short period of time. The transient flourishment of deep marine life in such environments is triggered by communities distinct from those of hydrothermal vents, cold seeps, and cold water corals. Whale (cetacean) falls attract deep-sea creatures that are otherwise difficult to find. Distinct faunal assemblages thrive sequentially in 4 successional stages: (a) the mobile scavenger stage, which removes the soft tissue; (b) the opportunist stage with dense colonization by heterotrophic macrofauna (particularly polychaetes and crustaceans); (c) the chemoautotrophic stage when thiophilic and methanogenic bacteria and archaea colonize the skeleton; and (d) the reefing stage when filter feeders colonize the remaining skeleton. These stages vary in duration, overlap with each other, and are affected by the size of the cetacean falls, the depths of whale falls, and other environmental variables [1]. Since the discovery of the first whale fall by the submersible Alvin in 1987 [2], less than 30 natural whale falls have been found [1,3,4]. Most of the whale falls were sighted in the east Pacific Ocean along the California coast, and only one was found in the West Pacific near Japan [1]. None has been observed in the South China Sea. We conducted simulated whale fall experiments for the first time by placing cow carcasses on different depths along the slope of a seamount in the South China Sea and obtained observations of different consumption rates of cow carcasses at different depths.
A wide range of evidence reveals that the tropical belt is expanding. Several mechanisms have been proposed to contribute to this expansion, some of which even contradict each other. The study of Yang et al. suggests that the poleward advancing mid-...
The Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System program, which uses the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (CM), has been updated with the launch of new satellites and the availability of newly upgraded radiation data. The spatial and temporal ...