PMEL in the News
Hundreds of deep-sea vents found spewing methane off US coast
Methane is gushing forth from hundreds of newly-discovered deep-sea vents all along the US’s western seaboard. “It appears that the entire coast off Washington, Oregon and California is a giant methane seep,” says Robert Ballard, founder and director of the Ocean Exploration Trust in Connecticut. In all, 500 new seeps were discovered by submersibles operated from the trust’s ship, Nautilus (see video below). The discovery will be presented this week in New York at the National Ocean Exploration Forum.
There's an Enormous Natural Gas Seep Along the West Coast
From British Columbia to Northern California, planet Earth’s got a case of the toots. A recent deep ocean mapping survey has learned that a geologically-active strip of seafloor called the Cascadia Subduction Zone is bubbling methane like mad. It could be one of the most active methane seeps on the planet.
How much heat does the ocean trap? A robot aims to find out
A fleet of robots, trolling the oceans and measuring their heat content, has revolutionized scientists' ability to study how climate change is affecting the seas. Now the aquatic machines called Argo floats are going into the deepest ocean abyss.
Surprise! La Nina might be back after all
Buried in the news late last week amid the feverish coverage of Saturday's upcoming Disappointment Day Storm was word from NOAA that La Nina might be back. Their Climate Prediction Center reissued a La Nina Watch on Thursday, just a month after killing it off.
How a super typhoon got sucked into a jet stream and spawned the storm that’s barreling right for us
Typhoon Songda didn’t make much of a splash earlier this week when it swept harmlessly past the east coast of Japan, hundreds of miles from shore. So it seems incongruous that this waning tropical storm, born 5,000 miles away, now threatens Washington with a Saturday windstorm that could be one of the fiercest in recent history.