IOC Spotlights Ocean Science and Sea Level Rise at UNGA81 - environment coastal & offshore

This week’s cover of the international journal 'Science' features a woman’s profile alongside a snake coiled around the female sex symbol. The snake and staff originate from the legend of Asclepius, the god of medicine in Greek mythology, and are used as symbols of medicine. Women account for more than half of the global population, yet most of what we currently know about the female body is based on research conducted in men and then generalized. This situation has begun to change in recent years.

When DJ Mr Famous sat down with Grammy winner Shaggy on Roadblock Radio’s Island Mix, one line from the dancehall legend went viral on social media: “There’s no one king for a genre.” “Beenie Man is a king. Kartel is a king. Shabba is a king,” Shaggy said, then grinned and added, “I’m a king.” But the conversation was about more than who deserves the dancehall crown. It pointed to something bigger, Jamaican/Caribbean music now having a foothold on prime-time American radio. Every Sunday from 7 p.m. to midnight, urban Power 96/Roadblock Island Mix dedicates a full five hours to reggae, dancehall, soca, konpa, Afrobeats, and the classics that never get old on a mainstream platform. And given Shaggy’s own career, it’s hard to think of a better voice to underscore just how significant this is. “When I started, there was no radio station that played dancehall or reggae,” Shaggy told Mr. Famous. “There’s no reggae budget. I realised that I was in the underground, so I had to work 10 times harder with 10 times less budget, 10 times less sleep, and make my records 10 times better.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.

Milky Way’s first microblazar candidate sits 12,000 light-years away, offering a rare ground-level lab for studying relativistic jetsA black hole 12,000 light-years away is firing a jet of plasma almost directly toward Earth. At that distance, no known or expected danger to Earth has been identified by the researchers or the institutions involved. What astronomers have actually found is rarer and more interesting than a threat. Researchers have identified IRAS 18293-0941 as a compelling candidate for the Milky Way’s first microblazar, a class of object that gives astrophysicists a close-up laboratory for studying some of the most violent physics in the galaxy. What Astronomers FoundThe discovery centers on a binary system whose black hole expels plasma jets at close to three-quarters the speed of light, pointed almost directly toward Earth. The system pairs a hot, massive star with a black hole that completes a full orbit roughly every 11.38 days. Material drawn from the companion star feeds the black hole, and some of that matter gets expelled outward as opposing jets traveling at approximately three-quarters the speed of light. Terminology matters here.

Forests that stood on Mozambique's coast thousands of years ago now lie beneath shallow seas, and they have become fish-filled "peat reefs" with marine life comparable to coral reefs, researchers report in Scientific Reports. A team from the Bazaruto Center for Scientific Studies (BCSS) Ocean Observatory, led by Mario Lebrato, documented the submerged peat in the Bazaruto Archipelago in the Western Indian Ocean. BCSS, founded in 2017, describes itself as Africa's first permanent ocean observatory. Working with universities and institutions in the U. K., U. S. and Canada, the team believes it has carried out the first ecological study of peat reefs anywhere in the tropics. Old forests, new seafloorRadiocarbon dating shows the peat formed between about 300 and 5,000 years ago, and chemical analysis indicates it came mostly from coastal land plants and trees. Some samples contain up to 40% organic carbon by dry weight. Lebrato said the coastline has very little natural hard seabed, mostly shifting sand. As rising seas expose the old peat layers, they create rare solid habitat where marine life can settle, hide and feed.