As global climate change intensifies, ocean acidification is becoming a ‘relentless killer’ threatening coral reef ecosystems. Recently, a research paper published in the international authoritative journal Research has revealed diverse survival strategies of reef-building corals in response to ocean acidification, providing a new perspective for understanding and protecting this fragile marine ecosystem.

New Arizona State University-led research findings from studying over two decades of satellite observations reveal that the Earth’s continents have experienced unprecedented freshwater loss since 2002, driven by climate change, unsustainable groundwater use and extreme droughts. The study highlights the emergence of four continental-scale “mega-drying” regions, all located in the northern hemisphere, and warns of severe consequences for water security, agriculture, sea level rise, and global stability. The research team reports that drying areas on land are expanding at a rate roughly twice the size of California every year. And, the rate at which dry areas are getting drier now outpaces the rate at which wet areas are getting wetter, reversing long-standing hydrological patterns. The negative implications of this for available freshwater are staggering. 75% of the world’s population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater for the past 22 years.

A new study offers the first direct evidence that deep-dwelling mesopelagic fish, which account for up to 94 percent of global fish biomass, excrete carbonate minerals at rates comparable to shallow-water species. The findings validate previous global models suggesting that marine fish are major contributors to biogenic carbonate production in the ocean.

Researchers from Prof. Quan-You Liu's team at Peking University decoded the complex accumulation mechanisms of China’s nonmarine shale oil, overcoming challenges from extreme geological heterogeneity. Through analysis of the Bohai Bay Basin, the research team revealed that the synergistic coupling of multiple geological factors governs shale oil accumulation and established multi-scale, multi-factor accumulation models for non-marine shale oil. Their new predictive model pinpoints high-yield "sweet spots," validated by drilling success, offering a roadmap for efficient exploration and extraction of nonmarine shale oil.

Nearly 14,000 volunteers took part in the citizen science project Iguanas from Above, helping to count endangered Galapagos marine iguanas through an online survey – and in doing so, contributed to the preservation of this unique lizard species. Every aerial image of the iguana colonies captured by drones was reviewed by at least 20 independent participants—a total of over 1.3 million inputs— explains campaign leader Dr Amy MacLeod from Leipzig University’s Institute of Biology. She concludes that citizen scientists can be deployed effectively to analyse drone data sets and estimate population sizes, thereby allowing researchers to obtain critical information on these marine iguanas more rapidly. MacLeod and her team have just published a paper on the project in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

Researchers led by the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Jennifer Raynor showed that artificial intelligence methods applied to satellite data provide a powerful new way to assess industrial fishing activity in MPAs, bridging blind spots in current monitoring methods. The first-of-its-kind study, published in the journal Science, found that the world’s most strongly protected MPAs had little-to-no industrial fishing activity.