Up to 11 million metric tons of plastic are sitting on the seafloor, mostly near coasts and shipping corridors.
seafloor
Posted inNews
New Seafloor Map Only 25% Done, with 6 Years to Go
Beneath the waves, the vast majority of the ocean is unknown. Seabed 2030 is using cutting-edge technologies to fill in the bathymetric blanks and fully map the seafloor.
Posted inNews
Mars as a Driver of Deep-Sea Erosion
An analysis of breaks in deep-sea sediment links the geological record to a 2.4-million-year cycle that heats Earth and ventilates our oceans.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
What’s Hot in Iceland? A Close Up View of Hotspot-Ridge Interaction
New seafloor magnetic data help scientists retrace the evolution of the Reykjanes Ridge, lending insights into the effects of a mantle plume on mid-ocean ridge organization and evolution.
Posted inScience Updates
Submarine Avalanche Deposits Hold Clues to Past Earthquakes
Scientists are making progress on illuminating how undersea sedimentary deposits called turbidites form and on reconstructing the complex histories they record. But it’s not an easy task.
Posted inNews
Scientists Quantify Blue Carbon in Bahamas Seagrass
The island nation’s underwater fields store huge reserves of carbon, though not as much as scientists thought.
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A Long-Lost Tropical Island Lies Off Brazil’s Coast
An undersea volcanic plateau in the southwestern Atlantic was a tropical island 45 million years ago.
Posted inNews
Mysterious Seafloor Pits May Be Made on Porpoise
Some shallow seafloor depressions off the coast of Germany that look like those associated with methane might instead be the work of porpoises.
Posted inEditors' Vox
The Not-So-Silent Depths
A new book reveals that ocean depths are far from silent voids, but are actually alive with noise.
Posted inNews
Bottom Trawling Shreds the Seafloor. It May Also Be a Huge Source of Carbon Emissions.
Dragging nets along the ocean bed wrecks marine life, but researchers can’t agree on how bad it is for the climate.