Where does beach sand come from? – the Conversation

Pebbles on the Beach (by Susanne Nilsson CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr).

Question from Sly M., age 6, Cambridge, Massachusetts…
There’s more to beach sand than meets the eye. It has stories to tell about the land, and an epic journey to the sea. That’s because mountains end their lives as sand on beaches….

Hurricanes push heat deeper into the ocean than scientists realized, boosting long-term ocean warming, new research shows – the Conversation

Thermal (heat) image view of Category 5 Hurricane Maria in 2017, as seen by NASA’s Terra satellite. Yellow and orange are the warm ocean waters, and blue and white are the hurricane’s tall, cool cloud tops (courtesy of NASA, public domain via NASA earth observatory).

Seven years ago an exceptionally strong El Niño took hold in the Pacific Ocean, triggering a cascade of damaging changes to the world’s weather. Indonesia was plunged into a deep drought that fueled exceptional wildfires, while heavy rains inundated villages and farmers’ fields in parts of the Horn of Africa. The event also helped make 2016 the planet’s hottest year on record. Now El Niño is back…

My art uses plastic recovered from beaches around the world to understand how our consumer society is transforming the ocean – the Conversation

‘Bounty Pilfered’ (center), ‘Newer Laocoön’ (left) and ‘Threnody’ (right). All made of ocean plastic from the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico, installed at the Baker Museum in Naples, Fla., 2022 (by Pam Longobardi, CC BY-ND via the Converstion).

“I am obsessed with plastic objects. I harvest them from the ocean for the stories they hold…Each object has the potential to be a message from the sea – a poem, a cipher, a metaphor, a warning. My work collecting and photographing ocean plastic and turning it into art began with an epiphany in 2005, on a far-flung beach at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii…