The Atlantification of the Arctic Ocean Is Underway – Hakai Magazine

Illustration of capelin (Mallotus villosus) public domain, via University of Washington's Digital Collection.

In the Fram Strait off Greenland’s west coast, Véronique Merten encountered the foot soldiers of an invasion.

Merten was studying the region’s biodiversity using environmental DNA, a method that allows scientists to figure out which species are living nearby by sampling the tiny pieces of genetic material they shed, like scales, skin, and poop. And here, in a stretch of the Arctic Ocean 400 kilometers north of where they’d ever been seen before: capelin.

And they were everywhere…

Seeing Through Turbulence to Track Oil Spills in the Ocean – EOS Magazine

Isreal Defense Force soldiers help clean up the 2021 Israel oil spill, February 2021 (courtesy of IDF Spokesperson's Unit CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Israel).

In mid-February 2021, heavy storms brought intense downpours to the eastern Mediterranean coast, keeping residents indoors. After the storms passed, residents returned to local beaches and noticed signs that something amiss had occurred offshore. In Israel, clumps of tarred sand appeared on beaches, along with oil-covered wildlife like turtles and fish. A dead 17-meter-long fin whale also washed ashore—an autopsy revealed oily liquid in its lungs, although the source of the oil was not identified definitively…