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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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.

Rutgers graduate student Heshani Pupulewatte (at right in yellow hard hat) collects water samples measuring conductivity, temperature and depth on a research ship in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. The ...

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 ...