Antarctica's Thwaites glacier has warm water from three directions well under it threatening to destroy the ice sheet and raise global sea levels by up to two feet. A team of scientists from Oregon State University made the most of ice free waters in West Antarctica to look under the glacier - which is about the size of Great Britain. Warm water from the deep ocean is welling up under the glacier from three different directions and mixing under the ice, the researchers discovered. If it collapses it could take other parts of the ice shelf with it and lead to the single largest driver of sea-level rise this century, lead researcher Erin Pettit told Nature. The £39million study involving UK and US scientists was launched after concerns the increasingly unstable glacier may have already started to collapse.

A fleet of 11 uncrewed vessels will traverse the world's oceans over the next ten years in a bid to map the sea floor. The bottom of the world's oceans remains a mystery, with around 80 per cent either poorly imaged or not visualised at all. Ocean Infinity launched in 2016 and has pledged its support to an international collaboration to try and map every inch of the ocean floor within the next decade. It has also attempted to use its technology to try and locate the missing Malaysian Airlines MH370 flight that tragically went missing with 239 people on board nearly six years ago. It has announced it has bought a fleet of 11 uncrewed vessels will traverse the world's oceans over the next ten years in a bid to map the sea floor Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USV) are the latest technology which open up the possibility for long-term marine missions. They have no humans on board and are controlled by computers via a satellite link and a central computer base.

Having the noble intention of cleaning up the mess we have made is just the start. The scale of that task is monumental. Aside from all the plastic floating around in the oceans and on the sea floor, spotting the waste that does turn up on beaches among pebbles and sand isn't easy. In an interview with DJI, The Plastic Tide outlined how they have been using a combination of drones and machine learning to identify and measure the amount of plastic waste on beaches. Eventually, the technology could develop into an automated aerial system, capable of guiding cleanup efforts and tracking their progress. Penning an article for DJI, founder Peter Kohler explains how he started using drones as part of his ambition to explain and understand the spread of plastic waste across our oceans. The main challenge was surveying beaches and collecting data in a way that was fast, cheap and effective.

The biggest underwater eruption of the last century took place 600 miles (1,000km) off the coast of New Zealand, scientists have found. The discovery was made after an airline passenger saw a strange substance spreading across the Pacific Ocean in 2012. At the time, scientists identified the material as pumice, a volcanic substance which floats. However, it has taken six years for researchers to understand the scale of the eruption with the help of remotely-operated deep search robots. The findings have been described as a'scientific goldmine' and could increase our understanding of how magma rises from the earth's crust to the surface More than 80 per cent of the volcanoes on Earth are located on the sea-floor.