The NICA-BRIDGE workshop proposes a milestone-driven three-phase project to ICDP and later ICDP/IODP involving short- and long-core drilling in the Nicaraguan lakes and in the Pacific Sandino Basin to (1) reconstruct tropical climate and environmental changes and their external controlling mechanisms over several million years, (2) assess magnitudes and recurrence times of multiple natural hazards, and (3) provide baseline environmental data for monitoring lake conditions.

Groundwater flows at the land–ocean transition and the extent of freshened groundwater below the seafloor are increasingly relevant in marine sciences, both because they are a highly uncertain term of biogeochemical budgets and due to the emerging interest in the latter as a resource. Here, we discuss our perspectives on future research directions to better understand land–ocean connectivity through groundwater and its potential responses to natural and human-induced environmental changes.