Melting of methane ice unleashed runaway global warming some 635 million years ago, according to a study released Wednesday that has implications for today's climate-change crisis.

Sea levels could rise by up to one-and-a-half metres by the end of this century, according to a new scientific analysis.  This is substantially more than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecast in last year's landmark assessment of climate science.

Gigantic ocean waves, spanning hundreds of kilometres from crest to crest, have been speeding up thanks to global warming, a new model suggests.

Global warming has increased acidity levels of the oceans by 30 percent and in the decades ahead will create new risks for coral, zooplankton and other creatures that help support the North Pacific fisheries, according to researchers at the University of Washington.

The delicate interplay between the oceans and atmosphere is changing with catastrophic consequences. Entire marine ecosystems have been wiped out, devastating populations of sea birds and larger marine mammals.

Current sea level rise projections could be under-estimating the impact of human-induced climate change on the world's oceans, scientists suggest. By plotting surface temperatures against sea level rise, the team found that levels could rise by 59% more than current forecasts.

Geologists have discovered underwater deposits of hydrates  icy deposits of frozen methane gas  at far shallower depths under the ocean floor than expected. The finding suggests that, in a globally warmed world, the hydrates could melt suddenly and release their gas into the atmosphere, thus warming the planet even more.

The Arctic may be close to a tipping point that sees all-year-round ice disappear very rapidly in the next few decades, US scientists have warned.

Scientists have uncovered more evidence for a dramatic weakening in the vast ocean current that gives Britain its relatively balmy climate by dragging warm water northwards from the tropics. The slowdown, which climate modellers have predicted will follow global warming, has been confirmed by the most detailed study yet of ocean flow in the Atlantic.

Global warming caused by humans is largely responsible for heating hurricane-forming regions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, probably increasing the intensity of the storms, scientists reported yesterday. The scientists used 22 computer models to simulate how the world's climate works and to help answer the question of whether more intense hurricanes are due to human activities.

Though most of the country's ocean beaches are eroding, few coastal jurisdictions consider sea level rise in their coastal planning, and still fewer incorporate the fact that the rise is accelerating. Instead, they are sticking with policies that geologists say may help them in the short term but will be untenable or even destructive in

the future.

Climate researchers at Purdue University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology separately reported new evidence yesterday supporting the idea that global warming is causing stronger hurricanes.

A one-two punch of bleaching from record hot water followed by disease has killed ancient and delicate coral in the biggest loss of reefs scientists have ever seen in Caribbean waters.

A 34-year trend of intensifying hurricanes has now been tied to warmer sea surface waters which, in turn, is being caused by global warming, say scientists. 

The world's coral reefs could disappear within a few decades along with hundreds of species of plankton and shellfish. Researchers have found that carbon dioxide, the gas already blamed for causing global warming, is also raising the acid levels in the sea.

The microscopic plants that underpin all life in the oceans are likely to be destroyed by global warming, a study has found. The vital plankton of the oceans can be starved of nutrients as a result of warming seas -- a development that can have catastrophic implications for the entire marine habitat.

The powerful ocean current that bathes Britain and northern Europe in warm waters from the tropics has weakened dramatically in recent years, a consequence of global warming that could trigger more severe winters and cooler summers across the region.

Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is threatening to make oceans too corrosive for marine organisms to grow protective shells. If emissions continue unabated, the entire Southern Ocean, which stretches north from the Antarctic coastline, and subarctic regions of the Pacific Ocean will soon become so acidic that the shells of marine creatures will soften and dissolve.

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in at least a century of record keeping. That shift is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, the team's members and other experts on the region said.

"Wide-ranging evidence shows that Earth has been warming in recent decades . Observations show that 84% of the total heating of the Earth system ...over the last 40 years has gone into warming the oceans. . . [T]he conclusion that the observed ocean warming is due to human influences is robust to major perturbations of both the observed data set and model error."

Corals off Florida, Barbados, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Cuba seemed to be undergoing the worst damage, known as bleaching, since 1997-1998. Corals are vital breeding grounds for many species of fish and draw tourists to the Caribbean.

Oceanic plankton have largely disappeared from the waters off Northern California, Oregon and Washington, mystifying scientists, stressing fisheries and causing widespread seabird mortality.

Climate change researchers have detected the first signs of a slowdown in the Gulf Stream -- the mighty ocean current that keeps Britain and Europe from freezing. One of the "engines" driving the Gulf Stream -- the sinking of supercooled water in the Greenland Sea -- has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength. The weakening, apparently caused by global warming, could herald big changes in the current over the next few years or decades -- leading to a sharp drop in temperatures in Britain and northwestern Europe.

A leading US team of climate researchers released "the most compelling evidence yet" that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis should "wipe out" claims by sceptics that recent warming is due to non-human factors such as natural fluctuations in climate or variations in solar or volcanic activity.

German scientists probing global warming said  they had detected a major temperature rise this year in the Arctic Ocean and linked this to a progressive shrinking of the region's sea ice. Temperatures recorded this year in the upper 500 meters (1,625 feet) of sea in the Fram Strait -- the gap between Greenland and the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen -- were up to 0.6 C (1.08 F) higher than in 2003, they said in a press release. The rise was detectable to a water depth of 2,000 meters (6,500 feet), "representing an exceptionally strong signal by ocean standards," it said.

The increasing acidity of the world's oceans could banish all coral by 2065, a leading marine expert has warned. Professor Katherine Richardson said sea organisms that produced calcareous structures would struggle to function in the coming decades as pH levels fell. The Danish expert told the EuroScience Open Forum 2004 that human-produced carbon dioxide was radically changing the marine environment.

Nearly 50% of the carbon dioxide that humans have pumped into the atmosphere over the last 200 years has been absorbed by the sea, scientists say.  Consequently, atmospheric levels of the potent greenhouse gas are not nearly as high as they might have been. But the heavy concentration of carbon dioxide in the oceans has changed their chemistry, making it hard for some marine animals to form shells.

Strange things are happening in the North Sea. Cod stocks are slumping faster than over-fishing can account for, and Mediterranean species like red mullet are migrating north. Several sea birds are also in trouble. Kittiwake numbers are falling fast and guillemots are struggling to breed. And, earlier this summer, hundreds of fulmar (a relative of the albatross) corpses washed up on the Norfolk coast, having apparently starved to death. Scientists suspect these events are linked and they blame global warming.

In light of the paleoclimate record and our understanding of the contemporary climate system, it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age. These same records suggest that it is highly unlikely that global warming will lead to a widespread collapse of the AMO--despite the appealing possibility raised in two recent studies --although it is possible that deep convection in the Labrador Sea will cease. Such an event would have much more minor consequences on the climate downstream over Europe.

Some climate scientists have been stirred to ridicule claims in an upcoming Hollywood blockbuster that global warming could trigger a new ice age. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, whose own models say the Gulf Stream could shut down within a century, said: "The DoD scenario is extreme and highly unlikely."

The world's coral reefs could be badly damaged by global warming unless drastic intervention measures are introduced. Warming is harming coral reefs in at least three ways. Changes of just 1 or 2 °C can stifle the life-giving algae. Spiralling levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, dissolve in sea water, creating an acidic cocktail that stops polyps oozing their skeleton. And warmer water makes the reef more vulnerable to other threats, such as overfishing, diseases and pollutants that drain into coastal waters.

The largest ice shelf in the Arctic -- an 80-foot-thick slab of ice nearly the size of Lake Tahoe -- has broken up, providing more evidence that the Earth's polar regions are responding to ongoing and accelerating rates of climatic change, researchers reported. The Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, on the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada's Nunavut territory, broke into two main parts, themselves cut through with fissures. A freshwater lake drained into the sea, the researchers reported. Large ice islands also calved off from the shelf and some are large enough to be dangerous to shipping and to drilling platforms in the Beaufort Sea.

Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests. A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.

Almost all marine life on the planet turns on a single ocean circulation pattern in the Southern Hemisphere which pumps nutrient-rich water from the deep and spreads it across the seas, scientists report.It suggests ocean life may be more sensitive to climate change than previously believed. Three quarters of all biological activity in the oceans relies on this single pattern in the Southern Ocean, reports Prof Jorge Sarmiento, of Princeton University, who led the study published today in Nature.

The delicate salt balance of the Atlantic Ocean has altered so dramatically in the last four decades through global warming that it is changing the very heat-conduction mechanism of the ocean and stands to turn Northern Europe into a frigid zone.  The study describes planet-scale changes in the regulatory function of the ocean that affect precipitation, evaporation, fresh-water cycles and climate. "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime," said Ruth Curry of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, the study's lead author.

Global warming means more snow, not less, for the Great Lakes and the snowbound region along the eastern border between Canada and the United States. Their study of snowfall records in the Great Lakes region and elsewhere suggests there has been a significant increase in snowfall in the Great Lakes region since the 1930s but not anywhere else.

The North Sea is undergoing "ecological meltdown" as a result of global warming, according to startling new research. Scientists say that they are witnessing "a collapse in the system", with devastating implications for fisheries and wildlife. Record sea temperatures are killing off the plankton on which all life in the sea depends, because they underpin the entire marine food chain. Fish stocks and sea bird populations have slumped."A regime shift has taken place and the whole ecology of the North Sea has changed quite dramatically", says Dr Chris Reid, the foundation's director. "We are seeing visual evidence of climate change on a large-scale ecosystem. We are likely to see even greater warming, with

Rising carbon dioxide levels are increasing the acidity of the world's oceans more rapidly than any time since the age of dinosaurs -- adding a worrisome new element to the debate over global environmental change. The change could threaten the health of everything from microscopic plankton to coral reefs and reach from the surface to the ocean depths.

A rise in sea temperatures killed off 90 per cent of the coral reefs near the surface of the Indian Ocean in only one year, while the remaining 10 per cent could die in the next 20 years, devastating fish stocks and tourism vital to coastal economies, new research  says.

A new global study concludes that 90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world's oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.  Whether off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, or in the Gulf of Thailand, the findings were dire: "[T]here is nowhere left in the ocean not overfished," said Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and lead author of the study.

New evidence from a rapidly warming part of Antarctica suggests that ice can flow into the sea much more readily than had been predicted, perhaps leading to an accelerated rise in sea levels from global warming. Many polar and ice experts said the new study, to be published today in the journal Science, suggested that seas might rise as much as several yards over the next several centuries. They called that prospect a slow-motion disaster, the cost of which -- in lost shorelines, salt in water supplies, and damaged ecosystems -- would be borne by many future generations.