The seas surrounding India, namely Arabian Sea (AS) and Bay of Bengal (BoB) with their associated coastal embayments form one of the highly productive areas and biodiversity hotspots in the tropics contributing profusely to the socio-economic front of the region. Therefore, acquiring knowledge on the climate change scenario of this region and its impacts on marine ecosystems in general and planktons, in particular, is considered crucial for better resilience.

Healthy marine ecosystems are crucial for people’s livelihoods and food production. Global climate stressors, such as warming and ocean acidification, can drastically impact the structure and function of marine food webs, diminishing the production of goods and services. Our ability to predict how future food webs will respond to a changing environment is limited by our understanding of species responses to climate change, which are often tested in isolation or in simplified experimental designs.

Noble gases trapped in ice cores are used to show that the mean global ocean temperature increased by 2.6 degrees Celsius over the last glacial transition and is closely correlated with Antarctic temperature.

Present-day mass redistribution increases the total ocean mass and, on average, causes the ocean bottom to subside elastically. Therefore, barystatic sea level rise is larger than the resulting global mean geocentric sea level rise, observed by satellite altimetry and GPS-corrected tide gauges. We use realistic estimates of mass redistribution from ice mass loss and land water storage to quantify the resulting ocean bottom deformation and its effect on global and regional ocean volume change estimates.

The history of the Earth system is a story of change. Some changes are gradual and benign, but others, especially those associated with catastrophic mass extinction, are relatively abrupt and destructive. What sets one group apart from the other? Here, I hypothesize that perturbations of Earth’s carbon cycle lead to mass extinction if they exceed either a critical rate at long time scales or a critical size at short time scales. By analyzing 31 carbon isotopic events during the past 542 million years, I identify the critical rate with a limit imposed by mass conservation.