An Earth Institute oceanographer answers this deep question from a reader as part of our Earth Month Q&A on Instagram.

Braving the high seas and a curious shark, a team of scientists taps into the secret social life of a microbe that’s crucial for marine ecosystems.

Early-career scientists aboard the UNOLS training cruise are getting to try new techniques and technologies, and collaborations are springing up everywhere.

In southern Greenland in summer, rivers have been streaming off the ice sheet, pouring cold fresh water into the fjords. A new study tracks where that meltwater goes—with surprising results.

Science at sea isn’t easy, but the benefits are huge, writes Sidney Hemming in her final post from a two-month expedition that collected millions of years of climate history in the deep-sea sediment from off southern Africa.

It turns out that studying lava flows at the bottom of the ocean uses many of the same methods as studying lava flows on other planets, writes Lamont’s Elise Rumpf.

With calm seas, the JOIDES Resolution’s latest sediment core comes up with what appears to be a fantastic, cyclic climate signal that is continuous back 7 million years, writes Sidney Hemming.

With coral bleaching spreading, a new project and app called Bleach Patrol is putting surfers, divers and snorkelers to work as citizen scientists, keeping an eye on the world’s coral reefs.

When you examine the behavior of the global oceans closely—really closely, at scales smaller than 100 kilometers—eddies and jets and fronts start to appear. For Ryan Abernathey, this is where ocean physics gets interesting.

A new study in Science questions the provocative idea that climate change may shape the texture of the sea floor. A Snickers bar helps explain what’s really going on.