Oceans

A team of scientists are spending 21 days investigating the unexplored Bounty Trough

Temperatures around Aotearoa New Zealand are increasing, and not just on land. Amid a changing climate, significant marine heatwaves have impacted Aotearoa over the past decade and are expected to become more frequent and intense.

The NIWA Invertebrate Collection (NIC) holds specimens from almost all invertebrate phyla. This is a result of about half a century of marine taxonomic and biodiversity research in the New Zealand region, the South West Pacific and the Ross Sea, Antarctica.

The Hunga-Tonga Hunga-Ha'apai (HT-HH) volcano was like a massive shotgun blast from the deep, generating the biggest atmospheric explosion recorded on Earth in more than 100 years.

Since the early 2000s, NIWA has been part of the international Argo programme, which is deploying floats to measure temperature and salinity throughout the world's oceans.

Follow a group of NIWA scientists investigating various aspects of plankton which are the base of the Antarctic oceans food web.

NIWA is leading a New Zealand partnership to map the South and West Pacific Ocean's seabed as part of a worldwide initiative to map the entire globe’s seafloor.

NIWA is working on macroalgae and microalgae with a wide range of stakeholders, government agencies, current clients and potential partners.

This dataset provides the most up-to-date bathymetry of one of the largest areas of deep-water seabed under national jurisdiction. The 250m resolution gridded bathymetric data set encompasses New Zealand's Exclusive Economic Zone and is available in multiple high-resolution file formats to suit a range of imagery and mapping needs.

Using a novel observational platform – ocean gliders—this research will observe and understand subsurface variations in temperature, salinity, oxygen and biological factors in water shallower than 200 metres – what we consider to be the shelf seas.

The NIWA Biodiversity Memoirs are comprehensive, definitive, illustrated reference works that capture the rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific study of New Zealand’s distinctive marine fauna and flora.

Scientists on an expedition to the underexplored Bounty Trough off New Zealand have discovered around 100 new and potentially new ocean species.