Global surface temperature has increased approximately 0.2 degrees C per decade in the past 30 years, similar to the warming rate predicted in the 1980s in initial global climate model simulations with transient greenhouse gas changes. Warming is larger in the Western Equatorial Pacific than in the Eastern Equatorial Pacific over the past century, and we suggest that the increased West-East tem...

The population genetic structure and historical demography of the flathead mullet Mugil cephalus were investigated using the mtDNA control region (CR) sequences (909-1015 bp) of 126 individuals collected from seven locations in the north-west Pacific between 2005 and 2007. Haplotype diversity (h = 0.9333-1.000) and nucleotide diversity (pi = 0.0046-0.1467) varied greatly among the sampling loca...

849 The impacts of anthropogenic climate change may be felt through changes in modes of natural climatic vari ability. ENSO is the most important year-to-year fluctuation of the climate system on the planet1, varying between anomalously cold (La Niña) and warm (El Niño) condi tions. Underpinning occurrences of ENSO events is the positive feedback between trade wind intensity and zonal contrasts...

A set of twelve state-of-the-art coupled ocean-atmosphere General Circulation Models (OAGCMs) is explored to assess their ability to simulate the main teleconnections between the West African monsoon (WAM) and the tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs) at the interannual to multi-decadal time scales. Such teleconnections are indeed responsible for the main modes of precipitation variability o...

The Indo-West Pacific gobiid fish genus Lotilia, symbiotically associated with alpheid shrimps, is reviewed. The genus comprises two species, viz. L. graciliosa Klausewitz, 1960 and L. klausewitzi sp. nov., the latter of which is described herein based on 11 specimens (including seven type specimens) from Japan, Australia and the Bismark Archipelago. Lotilia klausewitzi, previously misidentifie...

The family Sciaenidae, known as croakers or drums, is one of the largest perciform fish families. A recent multi-gene based study investigating the phylogeny and biogeography of global sciaenids revealed that the origin and early diversification of this family occurred in tropical America during the Late Oligocene-Early Miocene before undergoing range expansions to other seas including the Indo...

Additional material of species of Gennadas was collected off western Mexico during the TALUD survey aboard the R/V "El Puma". Gennadas sordidus was by far the most common species collected and only a few specimens of the other three species, G. incertus, G. propinquus and G. scutatus, were obtained. New and previous records indicate that Gennadas sordidus is widely distributed along the west co...

Reconstructions are presented documenting the relative motion of the Australia. Antarctic and Pacific plates since Chron 27 (61.1 Ma). In addition to the motion of the major plates, the reconstructions show the relative motion between East and West Antarctica and the continental fragments that make up the South Tasman Rise. Recent observations that are used in making these reconstructions inclu...

Precipitation over the contiguous United States exhibits large multi-decadal oscillations since the early twentieth century, and they often lead to dry (e.g., 1946–1976 and 1999-present) and wet (e.g., 1977–1998) periods and apparent precipitation trends (e.g., from the 1950s to 1990s) over most of the western and central US. The exact cause of these inter-decadal variations is not fully unders...

The water cycle in the western United States changed dramatically over glacial cycles. In the past 20,000 years, higher precipitation caused desert lakes to form which have since dried out. Higher glacial precipitation has been hypothesized to result from a southward shift of Pacific winter storm tracks. We compared Pacific Ocean data to lake levels from the interior west and found that Great B...