Atlantic Ocean

The most detailed photographic survey of the abyssal ocean floor has been taken by the National Oceanography Centre’s robot sub, Autosub6000 – some half a million photos that will be stitched together to form a ‘street view’ map of the North Atlantic’s Porcupine Abyssal Plain and its inhabitants.

Forward and down-facing cameras mounted on the…

NOC scientist, Dr Henry Ruhl, is leading an expedition to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, some 300 miles southwest of Lands End. He will be looking at how the shape of deep ocean floor and climate influence deep sea ecology, and he intends to do this by making a very large photographic map of the seafloor – 10km by 10km – an area roughly the size of…

Scientists from the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton will be joining a North Atlantic deep-sea drilling expedition that aims to uncover the secrets of the world’s climate system during the last period of ‘extreme warmth’, which occurred over 30 million years ago.

The expedition will collect samples of ocean sediment from depths of up to 5…

In 2013 Ben Fogle will attempt to swim more than 3,000 miles from America to Cornwall. Supported by a yacht, Ben will need to swim more than 30 miles a day to reach his target of completing the crossing in under 100 days.

Swimming up to 12 hours a day, Ben will use the support yacht for sleeping and eating, logging his stop and start position each…

A new study led by the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton has gone some way towards solving one of the biggest questions in marine ecology: how does life exist in a blue desert – the largest habitat on Earth.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined plankton from the surface waters of the North…

The earliest ocean measurements from 135 years ago used alongside the most up-to-date technology, confirm that ocean temperatures, particularly in the Atlantic, have increased since Victorian times.

The voyage of the sailing ship HMS Challenger from 1872 to 1876 was the first dedicated to ocean research on a global scale. Records taken then…

Bottom trawling fishing boats have devastated many cold water coral reefs along the margin of the North East Atlantic Ocean. Now, researchers have found large cold water coral colonies clinging to the vertical and overhanging sides of submarine canyons 1,350 metres below the surface of the Bay of Biscay.

The overhanging canyon walls protect the…