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MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Beatriz, the second named storm of the Pacific hurricane season, should become a hurricane later on Monday as it heads toward Mexican tourist beaches, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Each morning, a newspaper is slipped underneath our door. This morning, the front page of the Pacific Daily News read "Fishermen oppose reef bill." Right: Caitlin holds up the May 25, 2011, edition of the Pacific Daily News with the headline “Fishermen oppose reef bill” on the front-page center.

Ashley Park and Amber Watson, both juniors at Spanish Fort High School in Alabama, sent me an email after reading, "We discover what’s floating in the South Pacific." They wanted to know how trash travels in the ocean and if recycling is really the answer. Since I’m not a plastic pollution expert, I turned to Marcus Eriksen, the co-founder of 5 Gyres, a non-profit studying garbage in the ocean, to provide some answers.

On March 11, the seafloor 130 kilometers off Japan's eastern coast slipped more than 20 meters beneath the crust that makes up the Pacific plate, pulling the island nation as much as 4.3 meters closer to California and its coast 66 centimeters down. In fact, the first geologic sensors on the seafloor, which happen to lie near the center of the Tohoku-oki quake , as it is now formally called based on the closest regions of the island nation to the quake's epicenter offshore, registered a shift of some 24 meters east-southeast and an uplift of three meters at that point

Changing wind patterns could accelerate sea level rise along the West Coast, new research suggests. The cause is an apparent shift in a climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, said researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Several devastating earthquakes have rumbled beneath the Pacific in the past 15 months. In Feb

It's ubiquitous. It's universal. And it's understood—not! Water's choices in a given situation often defy scientific predictions.

Dear EarthTalk : We have an invasion of phragmites in the wetlands bordering our neighborhood. I understand they are a non-native plant that, if left unchecked, will overrun the whole ecosystem. How does one remedy this situation in an eco-friendly way?

In this installment, "The Big Thirst" author and Fast Company writer explores how water, which technically can't be made radioactive, could be the least threatening byproduct of the hobbled Fukushima plant. FACT: Nothing is thirstier than nuclear power plants. They use water deep inside the reactor core, and they use rivers of water for cooling

By Quirin Schiermeier of Nature magazine As radioisotopes pour into the sea from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, one reassuring message has been heard over and over again: the Pacific Ocean is a big place. That the isotopes will be vastly diluted is not in question

Imagine if, after the next Deepwater-esque oil spill, we simply deployed a fleet of inflatable sailboats, equipped with oil-sucking booms, that would autonomously sail to the spill and soak up the oil. Or, if we need accurate data about radiation in the water outside another power plant approaching meltdown, we just sent in our fleet of boats, because we don't feel bad about submitting our robot slaves to radiation.

As I came through airport security in Connecticut, upon presentation of my California driver's license, the TSA officer asked me, "Aren't you folks worried about how that big Japan quake is going to hit you next?" I was glad to be able to tell him that we're not any more worried than we were before, and that a writer had just made that up.

Why was Japan's March 11 earthquake so big? One answer is the large size of the fault rupture as well as the speed at which the Pacific Plate is continuously thrusting beneath Japan, U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.) scientist Tom Brocher told KQED News.

At 2:46 pm local time March 11, an 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck Sendai, a port city of one million residents in northeastern Japan. It was the largest earthquake recorded in Japan in the last century.