The rapid warming is not limited to the surface – the heat content of the Indian Ocean down to 2,000 meters is currently increasing at a rate of 4.5 zettajoules per decade. Ashutosh Mishra The Indian Ocean, a vital body of water bordered by 40 countries and home to a third of the global population,… Read More Indian Ocean racing towards unprecedented heatwave crisis
Will McGough, CNN On the north side of Molokaʻi — the least-visited Hawaiian Island — a piece of land called the Kalaupapa Peninsula juts out from the rest of the island. Lay eyes on it for the first time, and your reaction might be to call it a paradise. About 17 square miles (44 square… Read More At this national park in Hawaiʻi, a natural paradise and a medical purgatory
Loji Beach, nestled in a bay in West Java, is especially prone to plastic pile-ups. Ocean currents sweep the waste into the bay where it gets trapped in and ends up on the sand. “There’s no real community living here. There’s not a proper road to the beach, so there’s no local people cleaning it… Read More The world dumps 2,000 truckloads of plastic into the ocean each day. Here’s where a lot of it ends up
Marine researchers on a mission to record life hidden in the world’s oceans have reported they found about 100 potential new species — including one mystery starlike creature. The expedition team focused its investigation on the 500-mile (800-kilometer) long Bounty Trough, a little-explored part of the ocean off the coast of New Zealand, east of… Read More Scientists discover 100 potential new deep-sea species, including mystery creature
Before the port construction began, Vizhinjam was the largest and most important fishing village in Kerala. It was home to some 4,500 fishing families and several thousand boats Of all the Indian states I know, Kerala has the most active civil society organisations that flourish independently of governments and political parties. These groups work in… Read More Ramachandra Guha: Heed the words
Vic O’Sullivan Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression,” was, according to the poet WB Yeats, how he persuaded the playwright John Millington Synge to discover his muse – the desolate beauty of the Aran archipelago. Whatever was the… Read More Ocean views and authors lost: a literary tour of Ireland’s wild west coast
Barbara Wienecke Last week I saw a headline announcing that last year thousands of emperor penguin chicks had died in the Bellingshausen Sea, when the fast ice broke out unusually early. I was deeply saddened and devastated, but not surprised. The region where this dreadful event occurred has been one of the fastest warming areas… Read More I have studied emperor penguins for 30 years. We may witness their demise in our lifetime
You do not grow crops, you do not eat coconut, you do not drink the water: Stephen Palumbi, marine scientist The film Oppenheimer has shone a spotlight on the dawn of US nuclear weapons tests. In the Marshall Islands, where 23 of those earth-shattering blasts happened, people have never been able to forget Lucy Sherriff… Read More Endless fallout: the Pacific idyll still facing nuclear blight 77 years on
Chris Armstrong ; Antje Scharenberg Treasure trove or rubbish dump? In either case, oceans are being spoiled. Concepts from ‘mare liberum’ to ‘common heritage’ don’t safeguard the blue planet’s largest frontier from escalated seabed mining, industrialised fishing and waste disposal, nor global inequality and racialized violence. Could a democratic World Ocean Authority be the answer?… Read More Ocean justice
Ocean temperatures have hit record highs this year, growing so hot in some places that taking a dip in the sea feels like stepping into a hot tub. For kelp farmers, who grow an underwater crop with a life cycle highly dependent on temperature, that spells trouble for their harvests – and their nascent industry’s future. “Over the… Read More Can kelp survive rising marine heat?
After the truth-shower 