Pacific Ocean

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.

It can be hard to find what you're looking for in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. But scientists on an August research cruise had no problem tracking down their subject. "We did observe a lot of plastic out there in the ocean about 1,000 miles from anything," said Miriam Goldstein, chief scientist on the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition. "It's pretty shocking." A group of doctoral students and research volunteers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego and Project Kaisei spent nearly three weeks on the research vessel New Horizon taking samples and exploring the plastic garbage patch floating in the North Pacific.

Long before Ken Barnes Jr. tried to sail around Cape Horn, the roaring winds and savage seas in the abyss off the tip of South America brought fear to even the most experienced seamen. Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, for example. "He was dreading doing that," said author Laurence Bergreen, whose "Over the Edge of the World" tells the story of history's first circumnavigation of the globe. "He thought it was certain death."

After a three-day race to rescue a badly injured Newport Beach sailor stranded in the storm-whipped Pacific, a fishing trawler was expected to pluck Ken Barnes Jr. this morning from his crippled sailboat near the tip of South America. As a worldwide audience followed the rescue operation, attempts to reach the 44-foot ketch have been repeatedly thwarted by fierce weather off the coast of Chile.

A long night scouring a deep, dark ocean is proving uneventful -- until the luminous red dots begin drifting across the sonar screen. Banter in the wheelhouse suddenly stops and grubby fingers point to the dots clustered along the bottom, as if trying to locate the enemy. On deck, a fisherman lurches forward as his rod dips seaward. Another fisherman is jerked against the rail, then another. "What else can it be?" says Capt.

Authorities have recovered the bodies of 15 Central American migrants whose boat capsized in the Pacific Ocean, the Mexican navy said Saturday. Authorities corrected earlier statements by Oaxaca state officials that 24 bodies had washed up in San Francisco del Mar and a nearby town.

Climate experts meeting in Atlanta confirmed the start of La Nina -- a cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean that often coincides with stronger hurricanes, a wetter Pacific Northwest and a drier South. The event will probably last through late spring and possibly through the summer, said Edward Alan O'Lenic, chief of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center.

The Atlantic and Pacific oceans appeared to have connected at a point between South America and Antarctica about 41 million years ago, University of Florida researchers reported this week in the journal Science. Previous studies had dated the formation of the Drake Passage, which allowed the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to begin, as recently as 17 million years ago.

City Councilman Bill Rosendahl called Tuesday for a law that would protect neighborhood views of the Pacific Ocean, the Santa Monica Mountains and other natural resources. City planners are expected to draft a proposed law within 60 days. Rosendahl, who made a campaign promise to seek such an ordinance, said that "long-held and precious vistas of the ocean and the mountains are threatened by overdevelopment."

President Bush today will create the world's largest marine protected area, a total of 140,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean surrounding a necklace of islands and atolls that stretch from the main Hawaiian Islands to Midway Atoll and beyond, senior administration officials said. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Monument will be larger than all of America's national parks combined.