5,021 articles
Marine biology
Marine biology is the study of organisms living in the sea, from microbes to whales. Covers its history from Phoenician voyages and the Challenger era to WHOI and Scripps, physiological adaptation to warming, acidification, and deoxygenation, and modern eDNA and deep-learning methods.
Marine cloud brightening
Marine cloud brightening is a proposed solar radiation management technique that would spray sea salt into marine clouds to reflect more sunlight and cool the climate.
Marine heatwave
Marine heatwave: prolonged ocean warming event, defined as SST above the seasonal 90th percentile for 5+ days (Hobday et al.). MHW days doubled 1982–2016; 87% attributed to human-induced warming; 2023 set records.
Marine ice cliff instability
Marine ice cliff instability (MICI) is a proposed mechanism in which tall Antarctic ice cliffs collapse under their own weight, potentially adding over 1 m of sea-level rise by 2100.
Marine isotope stage
A marine isotope stage (MIS) is a numbered interval of Quaternary time defined by oxygen isotope ratios in deep-sea cores, marking alternating warm and cold periods.
Marine Isotope Stage 3
Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3) is an intermediate climatic stage of the last glacial period, roughly 57,000 to 29,000 years ago, known for abrupt Dansgaard–Oeschger warmings.
Marine Research Aquarium
Marine Research Aquarium: name shared by research aquarium facilities, notably ICAR-CMFRI aquaria at Calicut and Sagarika Vizhinjam in Kerala, the Sea Point aquarium in Cape Town, and the Australian Antarctic Division krill aquarium in Tasmania.
Marine stratocumulus clouds
Marine stratocumulus clouds are low, layered clouds over the oceans that cover more of Earth's surface than any other cloud type and strongly reflect sunlight, making them a leading source of uncertainty in climate prediction.
Marine terrace
A marine terrace is a flat, step-like coastal landform formed as wave erosion and land uplift interact over hundreds of thousands of years, recording past sea levels and earthquakes.
Marinoan glaciation
The Marinoan glaciation was the younger of the two Cryogenian Snowball Earth glaciations, a global ice age ending near 635 million years ago and followed by cap carbonates.
Marl
Marl is a calcareous clay, a mixture of calcium carbonate with clay or mud, much of it deposited in lakes and used as a natural liming material.
Marmato mine
The Marmato mine is an underground gold and silver mine at Marmato in Colombia's Caldas Department, wholly owned by Canada's Aris Mining and mined since pre-Colombian times.
Marshall Fire
The Marshall Fire was a wind-driven firestorm that burned through Superior and Louisville, Colorado, on December 30, 2021, destroying 1,084 homes, killing two people, and causing over $2 billion in damage.
Marshall-Palmer drop size distribution
The Marshall-Palmer drop size distribution is an exponential model of how many raindrops of each size are present in rain, proposed at McGill University in 1948.
Marsquake
A marsquake is a seismic event on Mars, caused by faulting, meteorite impacts, or thermal stress, first unambiguously recorded by NASA's InSight lander in 2019.
Martin Waldseemüller
Martin Waldseemüller, Latinized as Martinus Ilacomilus, was a German humanist and cartographer whose 1507 Universalis Cosmographia was the first map to name "America" and depict the New World as a separate continent.
Mary Anning
Mary Anning (1799–1847) was an English fossil collector and palaeontologist whose finds in the Jurassic cliffs at Lyme Regis, Dorset, included the first complete ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons.
Mascarene High
The Mascarene High, also called the Indian Ocean subtropical high, is a semi-permanent high-pressure area over the southern Indian Ocean that drives the Asian monsoon.
Mascota Volcanic Field
The Mascota Volcanic Field is a volcanic field of cinder cones and lava domes near Mascota in Jalisco, western Mexico, hosting the youngest known minette lavas on Earth.
Mass wasting
Mass wasting, also called mass movement, is the downslope movement of rock and soil under gravity alone, ranging from slow creep to debris avalanches reaching 400 km/h.
Matric potential
Matric potential, also called soil-water tension, is the part of soil water potential due to capillary and adsorptive forces, becoming more negative as soil dries.
Matthew Flinders
Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) was an English naval officer and hydrographer who led the first circumnavigation of Australia in HMS Investigator in 1801–1803, proved Tasmania an island, and promoted the name Australia.
Matthew Fontaine Maury
Matthew Fontaine Maury, also called Matthew F. Maury, was an American naval officer and oceanographer, known as the Father of Modern Oceanography for his wind and current charts.
Mauna Loa
Mauna Loa is the largest active volcano on Earth, a shield volcano covering over half of the Island of Hawaiʻi that last erupted in 2022.
Mauna Loa Observatory
Mauna Loa Observatory is a NOAA atmospheric research station on Mauna Loa, Hawaii, best known for the Keeling Curve, the longest continuous carbon dioxide record, begun in 1958.
Mawsynram
Mawsynram is a village in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya in north-eastern India, known as the wettest place on Earth with an average annual rainfall of 11,872 mm.
Maximum density of water
The maximum density of water occurs near 3.98 °C at standard atmospheric pressure, so water expands as it cools further, letting lakes freeze from the top down.
Maximum potential intensity
Maximum potential intensity, often called potential intensity, is a theoretical upper limit on the strength a tropical cyclone can reach in a given atmospheric and oceanic environment.
Maximum sustained wind
Maximum sustained wind is the highest near-surface wind speed averaged over a defined period, used as the standard measure of a tropical cyclone's intensity; the United States uses a 1-minute average.
May 2011 United States tornado outbreak
A May 2011 tornado sequence headlined by the EF-5 Joplin, Missouri tornado on May 22, which killed 158 people, followed by an Oklahoma outbreak that killed 11.