The Indian Ocean Dipole Mode (IODM) impacts many surrounding and remote regions of the Indian Ocean, with devastating floods over East Africa but severe droughts in countries surrounding Indonesia during a positive IODM event. Understanding the dynamics is important for seasonal prediction and climate projections, but the role of meridional temperature and circulation anomalies remains unclear....

The Great Australian Bight south of Australia is an important link for the flow of surface, intermediate and deep water between the Indian and Pacific Ocean. Carbon-14 is a tracer of this flow and for the first time, water samples for subsequent carbon-14 analysis were collected at several locations within the Bight. We report and discuss the observed carbon-14 distribution in relation to the g...

The interannual variability in the tropical Indian Ocean, and in particular the Indian Ocean dipole mode (IODM), is investigated using both observations and a multi-decadal simulations performed by the coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model SINTEX. Overall, the characteristics of the simulated IODM are close to the features of the observed mode. Evidence of significant correlations ...

[1] We reconstruct the hydrologic history of the tropical western Indian Ocean by calculating the dOseawater from coupled coral Sr/Ca and dO measurements in a massive Porites coral from Mayotte (Comoros) between 1881 and 1994. We found that the precipitation-evaporation balance varies naturally on time scales of 5–6 years and 18–25 years. High (low) SSTs are associated with positive (negative) ...

Ocean heat uptake is observed to penetrate deep into the Atlantic and Southern Oceans during the recent hiatus of global warming. Here we show that the deep heat penetration in these two basins is not unique to the hiatus but is characteristic of anthropogenic warming and merely reflects the depth of the mean meridional overturning circulation in the basin. We find, however, that heat redistrib...

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) emerged in Indian Ocean islands in 2005 and is causing an ongoing outbreak that involves >260,000 patients, including travelers returning home from these islands. We investigated cases in 4 patients returning from Mayotte and Reunion Islands with CHIKV infection and a nurse infected in metropolitan France after direct contact with the blood of a traveler. Four patients...

A new species of Hyalascus is described from the submarine volcanic crater seamount of Andaman Back-arc Basin, Indian Ocean. The genus was previously known in the Pacific Ocean only.

Introduction Heat and salt are distributed and circulated throughout the world’s oceans via the global thermohaline circulation. The oceans adjacent to southern Africa form an important component of this circulation. The Agulhas Current is the western boundary current of the South Indian Ocean and acts as a link between the Indian and Atlantic oceans in the following way. South of Africa the cu...

We construct a molecular phylogeny of Terpsiphone flycatchers of the Indian Ocean and use this to investigate their evolutionary relationships. A total of 4.4 kb of mitochondrial (cyt-b, ND3, ND2, control region) and nuclear (G3PDH, MC1R) sequence data were obtained from all species, sub-species and island populations of the region. Colonisation of the western Indian Ocean has been within the l...