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Southern Ocean saltier, hotter and losing ice fast as decades-long trend unexpectedly reverses

Researchers have discovered a dramatic and unexpected shift in the Southern Ocean, with surface water salinity rising and sea ice in steep decline.

Since 2015, Antarctica has lost sea ice equal to the size of Greenland—the largest environmental shift seen anywhere on Earth in the last decades. The Southern Ocean is also getting saltier, and this unexpected change is making the problem worse.

For decades, the ocean’s surface freshened (becoming less salty), helping sea ice grow. Now, scientists say that trend has sharply reversed.

An Alaskan volcano could help scientists understand why ‘stealthy’ volcanoes erupt without warning

When volcanoes are preparing to erupt, scientists rely on typical signs to warn people living nearby: deformation of the ground and earthquakes, caused by underground chambers filling up with magma and volcanic gas. But some volcanoes, called “stealthy” volcanoes, don’t give obvious warning signs. Now scientists studying Veniaminof, Alaska, have developed a model which could explain and predict stealthy eruptions.

Scientists capture slow-motion earthquake in action

Scientists for the first time have detected a slow slip earthquake in motion during the act of releasing tectonic pressure on a major fault zone at the bottom of the ocean.

The slow earthquake was recorded spreading along the tsunami-generating portion of the fault off the coast of Japan, behaving like a tectonic shock absorber. Researchers from The University of Texas at Austin described the event as the slow unzipping of the fault line between two of the Earth’s tectonic plates.

Their results were published in Science.