Oceans

An oxygen-depleted "dead zone" the size of New Jersey is starving sea life off the coast of Oregon and Washington and likely will appear there each summer as a result of climate change, an Oregon State University researcher said Thursday. The huge area is one of 400 dead zones around the world, most of them caused by fertilizer and sewage dumped into the oceans in river runoff. But the dead zone off the Northwest is one of the few in the world -- and possibly the only one in North America -- that could be impossible to reverse.

A federal judge in Los Angeles on Thursday temporarily set aside some of the tough restrictions on upcoming naval exercises off Southern California that employ a type of sonar linked to the injury and death of whales and dolphins. The decision by Judge Florence-Marie Cooper defers to President Bush, who moved earlier this week to exempt the Navy's exercises from environmental laws that formed the basis for a long-running court case between the Pentagon and environmentalists.

California's leaders should ban smoking on beaches, forbid fast-food joints from distributing polystyrene cups and containers and require markets to recycle plastic bags or ban them outright as part of an aggressive campaign to reduce plastic marine debris. These and dozens of other recommendations are included in a report to be released next week by Gov.

Broad Beach has long been a scenic backdrop to Malibu's public access wars. The tranquil rhythm of surf has been routinely shattered by security guards and sheriff's deputies bouncing beachgoers who spread towels on the confusing mosaic of public and private sand. Today, Broad Beach has shrunk into a narrow sliver of its former self. And like other skinny Malibu icons, its slenderness qualified the beach for a different kind of trend-setting role: How California will deal with rising sea levels.

They're a welcome change of pace, all slithery and grabby, squirting water and ink, providing boatloads of fun as well as delectable table fare. But then there's the aftermath. "The whole boat is black," says Capt. R.J. Hudson of the New Seaforth out of Seaforth Landing in San Diego. "It takes us an hour-and-a-half to scrub the boat once we get it back to the dock."

A vast undersea wedge of gravel and grit holds the ice streams of West Antarctica in place like a doorstop, even as rising seas caused by global warming threaten to undermine them, researchers at Pennsylvania State University said Thursday. The discovery may give the world a bit of breathing room. West Antarctica encompasses enough frozen fresh water -- 7 million cubic miles -- to raise sea levels worldwide 16 feet if its ice sheet disintegrates.

Off the western coast of Scotland, on the Isle of Islay, science teacher Ray Husthwaite turns on the light in his classroom. The electricity comes from a power cable that runs to the mainland. But it also comes from the ocean. A few miles from the school, wave action compresses and decompresses air in a chamber. The moving air powers a turbine, which generates electricity.

A review of existing computer climate models suggests that global warming could transform the North Pole into an ice-free expanse of ocean at the end of each summer by 2100, scientists reported today. The researchers said that out of the 15 models they looked at, about half forecast that the sea-ice cover -- a continent-sized expanse that shrinks and grows with the seasons -- would seasonally vanish by the turn of the century.

The oceans burped ... twice. About 13,000 and 18,000 years ago, carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere in two giant belches that drove concentrations of the greenhouse gas from 180 to 265 parts per million, where it held relatively steady until the Industrial Revolution. Scientists have long known about the jump in gas levels from looking at ice cores.

The Southern Ocean, a massive storehouse for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, is slowly losing its capacity to buffer the world from rising concentrations of the greenhouse gas, researchers reported Thursday. As a result, the study said, carbon dioxide could accumulate in the atmosphere faster than expected over the coming decades. The ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, accounts for about a third of all carbon stored in the world's five oceans.