Mark Hopwood

The MEDDLE Data Analysis Guides as a Living Resource for Multiple‐Driver Marine Research Click on the article title to read more.

Our data analysis guides for multiple stressor/driver research 🌊

@christinamcgraw.bsky.social
@sineadcollins.bsky.social
@mridulkthomas.bsky.social
@chrisecornwall.bsky.social
+ Peter Dillingham, Steeve Comeau, Sam Dupont

aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Tiny Turbulent Whirls Keep the Arctic Ocean Flowing - Eos Centimeter-sized turbulence controls the rate at which the Arctic Ocean churns.

Changing circulation patterns in the Arctic Ocean could affect weather thousands of miles away. Researchers dig into the details in new work. eos.org/research-spo...

River alkalinity is critical for coastal carbon dynamics & marine ecosystems. According to a modeling study, it significantly reduces the air-to-sea CO2 flux in river-dominated coastal ocean, and therefore OA (i.e., ~70% less flux into the ocean): 🌊🧪 agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

🌊📆 🌊 Ring in the new year with our 2026 wall calendar! Each of these amazing images of ocean life and field work was captured by our scientists and photographers—and your purchase helps support their work!

📲Order yours at the WHOI Store: go.whoi.edu/2025-calendar

📸 © #WHOI

That is interesting, because there was a weird exchange about this online. The original authors claimed TMC sponsored the work but then tried to stop publication, TMC claimed they were trying to stop misreporting of data. Not really clear what's going on, but scientifically the criticism is robust.

Quite... I don't usually read Frontiers/MDPI at all, just noticed this opinion online and thought it was noteworthy how it developed.
Some journals won't accept any comments on papers in other journals, so the authors may not have had much choice if [I guess] NGeoscience declined to consider a reply

These editorial decisions are always difficult, but it's bizarre that uncontroversial corrections to this argument have to be published in an opinion article in another journal...

As per the opinion piece, high-profile low-credibility science can be extremely damaging and needs correcting 🌊

Most of these problems are likely from poor quality analytical work, but then there are more concerning and difficult questions about whether the authors properly represented their data... In any case, Nature Geoscience hasn't accepted any comment on the paper, and doesn't (ever?) retract papers...

Frontiers | Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence: Evaluating Nodule-Associated Dark Oxygen Production Dark oxygen production (DOP) broadly encompasses all light-independent pathways that produce oxygen (Ruff et al., 2024), including microbial and abiotic proc...

A rather pointed Opinion piece in Frontiers & a totally bizarre situation. Nature Geoscience published a 2024 claim of dark O2 production on the Pacific seafloor. There were several obvious problems with the work & multiple lines of argument that it wasn't correct
www.frontiersin.org/journals/mar...

Top marks @klaus-tschira-stiftung.de for their review format. Of all organizations I review for, their procedure is by far the smoothest 👍

Many organizations that ask for peer reviews are not so careful, so I have a 15 minute rule- If I can't access files within 15 min of trying, I decline to do it

An actionable guide to the United Nations' Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement for research scientists The United Nations' “Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction” (BBNJ) Agreement establishes a broad framework regulating activities—including scientific research—in marine Areas Beyond National Juri....

Love papers like this:
"An ACTIONABLE guide to the United Nations' Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Agreement for research scientists"

aslopubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

🌊 🦑 🧪 #openaccess #deepseamining

Missed the GEOTRACES Intermediate Data Product 2025 launch webinar? 🌊

The full event and individual talks are now available to watch:
👉 www.geotraces.org/launch-of-ge...

#IDP2025 #GEOTRACESDataProduct #TraceElements #marinescience #OceanScience
@scor-int.bsky.social @unoceandecade.bsky.social

Do you have Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and ColouredDOM/FluorescenceDOM data from coastal waters?

Join this BioGeoSea initiative and help create a global, open-access dataset that will transform how we monitor coastal DOC and understand biogeochemical processes.

Glacier Runoff Becomes Less Nutritious as Glaciers Retreat - Eos Sediment from retreating, land-terminating glaciers contains proportionally fewer micronutrients such as iron and manganese, reducing the glaciers’ value to microorganisms at the base of the food web.

The "nutritional value" of glacial runoff is changing. Researchers found meltwater from retreating glaciers delivers sediment with lower concentrations of usable iron and manganese to coastal ecosystems. ❄️🧪 eos.org/articles/gla...

The 3 graphs show temperature, salinity, and oxygen from the surface to 300 m versus year from 2018 through 2025 for profiling float 5905383. The map shows the trajectory of the float from deployment in the Weddell Gyre (green square) and a loop around the Weddell sea to the present position at the red square.

What's interesting as the Thanksgiving Holiday arrives? The first @bgc-argo.bsky.social profiling floats begin to emerge from under Antarctic sea ice each year. Float 5905383 is the first @soccomproject.bsky.social float for 2025/26. It has spent 7.9 years operating under ice.
#argofloats #oneargo

Living Color The weird and wonderful world of nudibranchs

✨Neon greens, yellows, and pinks—iNaturalist data has never looked so good!

What is a nudibranch? Where does it live? And where does it get those wild colors? Discover the answers:
ow.ly/fqtq50XwgeW

🦑 🌊 #gischat

Yes. We certainly need that, and it can be done, but many of the barriers to decarbonization are not technological. We have the technology to almost completely decarbonize transport and power generation, and it some places this is being rolled out fast, but elsewhere nowhere near fast enough...

Greenlandic families fight to get children back after parenting tests banned The Danish government has banned the use of parental competency tests on Greenlandic families after decades of criticism.

Unfortunately the west is often in a state of denial to colonial injustices which continue to this day. Greenlandic parents in Denmark are 6x more likely to have their kids taken away. Why? Maybe because tests to determine a fit parent are based on Danish cultural norms
www.bbc.com/news/article...

We've known burning fossil fuels causes global warming since 1911. We've known the quantitative relationship between increasing atmospheric CO2 and global warming since 1977. But in 2025 we still cannot achieve a global political consensus on how & when to stop burning fossil fuels 😔 #climatechange

Can you see the scorpionfish? (hint: eyes to the left, caudal fin to the right) They are tremendously camouflaged and I generally miss them, but this one shot in front of me, dropped onto some coral, and then stayed motionless. 🦑 #scuba #diving #oceans

Use of citations and paper numbers as evaluation criteria for anything is not only flawed, but also widely abused, even in quality journals.

Stats for my favorite, respected oceanography journal show the "top" 2 2022/23 papers were both outliers, by the same author, and self-cited 23+ times (!!!) 🌊

A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.

A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.

The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.

We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:

a 🧵 1/n

Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...

New! GEOTRACES Data Product 2025-Now available! 🌊

Hydrographic and marine biogeochemical data from 123 cruises covering the global ocean

*Bulk download
bodc.ac.uk/geotraces/data/dp/
*Data subsetting
geotraces.webodv.awi.de
*Data analysis, visualisation
explore.webodv.awi.de
*Atlas
egeotraces.org

Science fraud is on the rise, facilitated by for-profit, open-access journals (Richardson et al, 2025, PNAS). These same journals are accelerating author and reviewer burnout by profiting from quantity while neglecting quality. Choose society journals where reputation and community are everything!

Are you a dynamic, organized ocean scientist and an enthusiastic writer and communicator? Lead and serve your community as an editor @jgr-oceans! Follow this link to apply tinyurl.com/OceansEditors

#PolarPride Reminder: Diversity enriches teams like mixing water masses enriches the Southern Ocean. Different sources, one powerful system. 🌊🌈

The Southern Ocean connects the planet —Polar Pride reminds us that inclusive science is stronger science.

#PolarPride #ScienceIsForEveryone #LGBTQinSTEM

It always tickles me silly when I read some reviewer's blunt comments about a piece of submitted work being useless/worthless/meritless/unpublishable, without much of a constructive comment about why or how to improve, and the authors reply... "Thank you for this insightful/thoughtful comment" 😅

The domination of scientific publishing by major commercial publishers is damaging science... Amen to that.

Journals should be led by public scientists
Journals should be publicly owned
& "Number of papers published" should mean nothing to anyone

#AcadmicChatter

Downtown Shenzhen at night

Downtown Shenzhen with Shenzhen Bay in the background and Hong Kong beyond that

I've lived on the top floor before, but previously this was in the context of a bedroom in the attic 😅

The view over Shenzhen Bay and Hong Kong is slightly better this time 😆

Maybe a stupid question- are these mCDR numbers only activities which are credited as mCDR? The 'riverine alkalinity addition' seems very low, I assume it does not include runoff from agricultural liming, or waste treatment procedures which add alkalinity routinely (e.g. sewage, aquaculture waste?)