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A Canadian-led team of international astronomers has made a groundbreaking discovery about how young planets form and grow using a creative approach with unique tools of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope was used to study PDS 70, a young star orbited by two growing planets. This remarkable system, located 370 light-years away, gives scientists a rare chance to see how planets form and evolve during their earliest stages of development.

Landmark new research shows Ice Age teens from 25,000 years ago went through similar puberty stages as modern-day adolescents. In a study published today in the Journal of Human Evolution of the timing of puberty in Pleistocene teens, researchers are addressing a knowledge gap about how early humans grew up.

Massive volcanic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions contributing to an extreme global ocean deoxygenation event over 120 million years ago has modern day implications for understanding a climate warming "tipping point," according to new research published in Nature this week, led by a scientist at Ocean Networks Canada, a University of Victoria initiative.

Northern elephant seals were repeatedly captured on camera in the deep Pacific Ocean using sonar from an Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) observatory as a dinner bell to forage for their next fish feast, according to a new study led by University of Victoria researchers. The research study published in the peer-reviewed PLOS ONE journal provides a unique, first-ever visual glimpse into the elusive mammal's deep-sea behaviours, with a focus on their sophisticated feeding strategies, prey preferences as well as resting habits.

A new study analyzing over 230 fisheries has found that their sustainability is likely overstated world-wide. Previous estimates of the number of fish in the ocean globally may have been too optimistic; two-thirds of fisheries in the study had over-estimated the number of fish available when making earlier management decisions.

Open any astronomy textbook to the section on white dwarf stars and you'll likely learn that they are "dead stars" that continuously cool down over time. New research published in Nature is challenging this theory, with the University of Victoria (UVic) and its partners using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to reveal why a population of white dwarf stars stopped cooling for more than eight billion years.

The effects of marine heatwaves caused by climate change on corals and biodiversity are worse than previously thought, according to new University of Victoria research published on Friday that also provides important clues about broader coral diversity and marine ecosystem health as the world grapples with record ocean temperatures.

Injecting carbon dioxide (CO2) into ocean basalt has almost no risk of triggering any seismic activity such as earthquakes or fault slip according to new research from Solid Carbon , a promising climate change mitigation project for reducing the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere. Advanced computer modelling by scientists with the Solid Carbon team shows injecting CO2 under the Cascadia Basin has less than 1 percent chance of causing fault slip.

Marine heatwaves triggered by climate change pose an imminent threat to the world's coral reefs. But most reefs are also exposed to local stressors, ranging from coastal development, pollution and overfishing. Few studies take into account how stressed-out reefs respond to heatwaves until now. A groundbreaking five-year study tracking hundreds of corals through a globally unprecedented heatwave now shows that individual coral species fared much better at sites without local stressors.

New research has uncovered a change in behaviour of deep-sea fragile pink sea urchins off the south coast of Vancouver Island that is linked to climate change impacts including the " Blob ," a marine heatwave that persisted in the Pacific Ocean off North America between 2013 to 2016. Researchers from the Memorial University, Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) and the University of Victoria (UVic) found pink sea urchins  ( Strongylocentrotus fragilis ) have been moving up into shallower waters as food sources and oxygen levels at lower depths decline due to a warming ocean.

A unique interaction between sea otters and the flowing plant known as eelgrass has researchers looking closer at the co-evolution of the two species. In a paper published today in the journal Science , University of Victoria geography PhD graduate, Erin Foster, explains how the digging activities of sea otters disturbs eelgrass beds, which in turn leads to greater genetic plant diversity.

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