The Gulf of America is experiencing accelerated sea-level rise driven by ocean dynamics, vertical land motion and warming waters, intensifying flood risks for coastal communities – especially rural, under-resourced areas with limited planning capacity. A new four-year, $900,000 grant supports high-resolution modeling, machine learning and community engagement to deliver precise local projections, deploy water sensors and build an accessible AI platform, equipping communities with actionable forecasts to strengthen resilience and long-term adaptation.

For scientists who study the Southern Ocean, a long-standing silver lining in the gloomy forecast of climate change has been the theory of iron fertilization. As temperatures rise and glaciers in Antarctica melt, ice-trapped iron would feed blooms of microscopic algae, pulling heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow.

There’s just one problem: The theory doesn’t hold water.

In what researchers describe as the most accurate measurement of iron inputs from a glacier in Antarctica, marine scientists from Rutgers University-New Brunswick have discovered that meltwater from an Antarctic ice shelf supplies far less iron to surrounding waters than once thought.

The findings, published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, raise questions about the sources of iron in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica, and could significantly alter how climate change predictions are forecasted and modeled, the researchers said.

A research team from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS) reconstructed the record of the South China Sea Throughflow's volume transport from 1894 to 2022. Their findings were published in Science Advances on February 25.

During a January 2026 expedition aboard the Spanish polar research vessel Hespérides, MBARI researchers and an international team of collaborators from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Stockholm University, The University Centre in Svalbard, the University of Barcelona, the University of Haifa, and the University of Milano-Bicocca studied how a warming climate may be affecting seafloor processes in Antarctica. Funded by the Polar Research Infrastructure Network (POLARIN), this expedition conducted the first controlled-source electromagnetic surveys in Antarctica to understand how a rapidly warming polar environment impacts groundwater systems under the seafloor.