Each year, vast blooms of phytoplankton spread across the Southern Ocean, drawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and fueling Antarctica’s marine food web. For decades, scientists have attributed ...

Stanford researchers have uncovered evidence that deep underwater earthquakes can spur the growth of massive phytoplankton blooms at the ocean surface. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest ...

How can earthquakes contribute to ocean life? This is what a recent study published in Nature Geoscience hopes to address as a team of scientists investigated a connection between seismic activity and ...

Phytoplankton—microscopic algae that form the base of ocean food webs—have long been viewed as transient players in the global carbon cycle: They bloom, die, and the carbon they contain is quickly ...

The ocean is losing its greenness, a new study has found: Global chlorophyll concentration, a proxy for phytoplankton biomass, declined over the past two decades, especially in coastal areas.

Antarctica sits atop one of the planet’s most powerful climate levers. The frigid waters encircling the continent soak up a large share of the carbon dioxide humans emit, thanks to vast communities of ...

Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel ...

The lush greenery of the Amazon rainforest is often called the “lungs of the planet,” but really land plants are just half of the equation. The other lung dwells in the sea. Single-celled ...

Pytoplankton are plant-like microorganisms that are estimated to have generated half of the Earth's oxygen supply. And even when they die, they fall to the ocean floor and turn into a massive carbon ...

Deployment of an instrument used to collect water samples from different ocean depths in the northern Ross Sea to determine their iron concentration. Stanford researchers have uncovered evidence that ...