News

The September 2026 IMBeR newsletter is available here.

The September 2026 IIOE-2 newsletter is available here.

Dear colleagues,

The fifth GEOTRACES Online Seminar, organised by the Early-Career Scientist Committee, will be held on Tuesday, 29 September 2026, from 15:00 to 16:00 CEST:

Topic: Biogeochemical Cycling of Redox-Sensitive Metals in Oxygen Minimum Zones
Speakers: Prof. James W. Moffett (University of Southern California, USA) & Jessalyn E. Davis (University of Washington, USA)
Moderator: Dr. Yang Xiang (Louisiana State University, USA)
Flyer

By Zoom: https://geomar-de.zoom-x.de/j/63657733493?pwd=6Uman0pQaKQ56P9SkXoUfz55XqqO7a.1
Meeting ID: 636 5773 3493
Passcode: 651026

Further information on this and upcoming seminars is provided below. Recordings of previous seminars are available on the GEOTRACES YouTube channel or via the following OneDrive link: 2026OnlineSeminars.

We hope to see many of you online!

You can download the flyer here.

Upcoming seminars:

Date/Time: October 27th, 15:00 CET
Topic: Hydrothermal Impact on Ocean Biogeochemistry
Moderator: Lise Artigue
Speakers: Christopher German (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA) & Laura Moore (University of Victoria, Canada)

Date/Time: November 24th, 15:00 CET
Topic: Sediment-Water Interface Processes & Boundary Exchange
Moderator: Zhouling Zhang (GEOMAR, Germany)
Speakers: Florian Scholz (University of Hamburg, Germany) & Rhiannon Jones (British Antarctic Survey, UK)

Date/Time: December 15th, 15:00 CET
Topic: Working backwards: How do we know a paleo-proxy works?
Moderator: Layla Creac’h (IFREMER – Centre Bretagne, France)
Speakers: Tristan Horner (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, USA) & Matthew Jeromson (University of Canberra, Australia)

The next SOOS Symposium 2027 will take place in Naples, Italy, from 6–10 September 2027.

Join the Southern Ocean community for five days of discussion, collaboration and coordination around Southern Ocean science and observations.

Associated meetings and events can take place from 4–11 September.

More information: https://soos.aq/soos-symposium-2027/

People can also join this mailing list for updates: go.soos.aq/Symposium2027Updates

SOLAS is pleased to announce a new Call for SOLAS 3.0 Task Group Proposals.

As part of the implementation of the SOLAS 3.0 Science Plan, Task Groups provide a small, focused, and time-limited mechanism for the SOLAS community to address specific scientific needs, gaps, or opportunities and develop tangible outcomes.

Up to USD 30,000 is available for this call, with individual Task Groups eligible for up to USD 10,000 for activities over a period of up to two years. Co-funding and in-kind contributions are welcome.

Task Groups may support focused activities such as scientific or community workshops, synthesis and roadmap development, best-practice activities, pilot activities, or other initiatives that address a clearly identified SOLAS 3.0 need. They may also support focused activities arising from existing SCOR Working Groups or help incubate ideas for future larger initiatives.

Proposals should focus on a specific, achievable task with clear and tangible outcomes.

For full information on the Task Group scope, eligibility, proposal requirements, funding, and application process, please see the SOLAS 3.0 Task Group Instructions.

Proposal deadline: 13 November 2026

Fill in the proposal template and submit it via email to the SOLAS IPO (solas@xmu.edu.cn)

We encourage the SOLAS community to take this opportunity to develop focused and innovative activities that can contribute to the implementation of SOLAS 3.0.

SCOR WG 174 SPASS: Small Plastics in the Ocean’s Interior: coherent Analysis and Synthesis for better Scrutiny has been endorsed as a UN Ocean Decade Project under the JETZON Programme.

SPASS aims to address critical knowledge gaps in understanding small plastics in the ocean interior by harmonizing methods for sampling, measurement, and data reporting of small plastics across the water column.

The working group goals are to develop better-practice standards, validate existing datasets, promote open data sharing, and to strengthen international and regional research capacity.

Congratulations!

We are delighted to announce the official launch of the SOLAS 3.0: 2026–2035 Science Plan and Organisation—a bold new framework charting the next decade of international research at the ocean–atmosphere interface.

Built from strong community input and assembled by over 40 co-authors, the plan is designed to inspire, organise, and provide the community with leverage for ideas that advance SOLAS-related science. The plan is structured around three objectives:

Discovery Science
To achieve a quantitative understanding of the key biogeochemical-physical interactions and feedbacks between the ocean and atmosphere and to establish how this coupled system affects and is affected by Earth’s rapidly changing global climate.

Science Towards Solutions
To leverage expertise and new scientific discoveries relating to air-sea interactions in efforts to inform activities aimed at mitigating or adapting to climate and environmental change and thus improve the assessment of potential outcomes of such efforts on global, regional, and local environmental scales.

Scientific Community and Skill Development
To educate, engage, and connect the next generation of ocean-atmosphere researchers, advocate for equitable access to data and tools, and promote the integration and global coordination of science across the air-sea interface.

Entering its third decade, SOLAS stands at the intersection of science and society. With its expertise in air–sea processes, SOLAS is in an exceptional position to integrate the oceanographic and atmospheric communities and advise on essential mitigation and adaptation strategies.

SOLAS will continue to be guided by its Scientific Steering Committee (SSC), Early Career Scientist Committee (ECSC), national and regional representatives, and International Project Office (IPO), and will call for Task Group proposals to pursue elements of SOLAS 3.0. The Implementation Strategy will be updated regularly on the SOLAS website.

We wish to express our profound gratitude to the co-sponsors of SOLAS — the Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), Future Earth, the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP), and the International Commission on Atmospheric Chemistry and Global Pollution (iCACGP) — for their generous support and commitment. We also gratefully acknowledge the support provided by the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science (Xiamen University) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology to the SOLAS IPO.

Read the Executive Summary
Read SOLAS 3.0 Science Plan

We are pleased to announce an upcoming 4D-BGC webinar on Wednesday, September 30th, at 14:00 UTC / 16:00 CEST. Arianna Olivelli from Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) will present (Un)Detectability of ocean deoxygenation trends across machine learning reconstructions differing in climate predictors. More information can be found below:

Wednesday, 30 September, 2026 at 4 pm CEST / 2 pm UTC

Registration Link: https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/V768mHtxSD2P4xZeIgY1Mw

Meeting ID: 988 9348 8540  ●  Passcode: 953324

Find your local number: https://us06web.zoom.us/u/kdy6pLJAeC

SCOR Working Group 168 Webinar #11

Title: (Un)Detectability of ocean deoxygenation trends across machine learning reconstructions differing in climate predictors

 Presenter:

Arianna Olivelli

Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ)

Machine learning models have become a widely used tool for reconstructing global ocean dissolved oxygen (O₂) concentrations, yet some key methodological choices remain poorly constrained. Most existing ML-derived products include a non-physical measure of temporal changes, such as year of observation or number of months, as a model predictor, and its effect on reconstructed deoxygenation trends has not been systematically assessed.  In this talk, I will present the results of a multi-model experiment comprising of eight feed-forward neural networks, which represent four different climate predictor configurations at 0.25° and 1.0° monthly resolution, and their resulting gridded products of O₂ concentrations from the surface to 1500 m depth between 1993 and 2022. I will show that while all experiments perform comparably well against a held-out test set, climate predictor choice is the dominant source of methodological uncertainty in reconstructed deoxygenation trends. Additionally, using inter-experiment consistency as a measure of signal detectability, I will show that robust detection of global ocean deoxygenation over 1993–2022 is currently limited to the surface ocean, while in the ocean interior methodological uncertainty renders robust detection of deoxygenation trends largely unachievable.

You can view and subscribe to the 4D-BGC webinar calendar here:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/2?cid=c2Nvci53Zy4xNjhAZ21haWwuY29t

4D-BGC webinars are recorded, and previous presentations can be found at https://www.youtube.com/@4D-BGC

The August 2026 IIOE-2 newsletter is available here.

Congratulations, Babette Christelle Tchonang, for selection as the next SCOR Executive Committee Early-Career Member! Dr. Tchonang will support SCOR’s efforts to enhance support and outreach to early-career ocean scientists. We look forward to her term starting after the upcoming SCOR annual meeting!

Dr. Tchonang is a physical oceanographer specializing in operational oceanography, ocean forecasting, satellite altimetry, and ocean data analysis. She is currently an Assistant Research Scientist at Florida State University, USA.

Beyond her research, Dr. Tchonang is deeply committed to international scientific collaboration and capacity development. She is the Founder of the Gulf of Guinea Ocean Sciences Summer School, Scientific and Technical Lead of OPERA (Ocean Prediction Enhancement in Regions of Africa) Capacity Development Activities, ECOP Co-Chair of the OceanPredict Intercomparison and Validation Task Team, and was a 2025 SCOR Visiting Scholar.

Welcome!