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?
The transfer of more than 1 million barrels of oil from an ageing tanker moored off the coast of war-torn Yemen has been completed, avoiding an environmental disaster, the UN has said. In a statement on Friday, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for UN secretary general António Guterres, said the operation had prevented a “monumental environmental and… Read More Yemen: UN removes 1m barrels of oil from tanker to avert environmental catastrophe
Amid news of lethal heatwaves across the Northern Hemisphere comes the daunting prospect of a climate disaster on an altogether grander scale. Robert Marsh New findings published in Nature Communications suggest the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or Amoc, could collapse within the next few decades – maybe even within the next few years – driving European weather… Read More The Atlantic is at risk of circulation collapse – it would mean even greater climate chaos
Luke Taylor in Providence The first thing that strikes visitors arriving on Old Providence is the island’s deep serenity. There are no cars and little noise except for the reggae playing at beach bars. Unlike most of Colombia’s tourist hotspots, there are no hawkers either; visitors are left to laze on the powdery white sands of… Read More A tiny island fears for its way of life
Tasmania was the site of some of the most brutal conflicts in the country. The British arrived in 1803, setting up a penal colony on the island and decimating the palawa population through disease, dispossession and violence. The colonisers forced the remaining Tasmanian Aboriginals onto missions, where most died, and rounded others up onto a… Read More The hike making Australia a better place
Adam Tooze ‘Vautour II’ flying in the cloud of the ‘Canopus’ nuclear explosion, the first explosion of a French thermonuclear bomb, over the lagoon of the Fangataufa atoll in French Polynesia in 1968. The Vautour II was taking samples of material from the cloud. Source: Marlène Aviation https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/russia-under-sanctions-the-foreign?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email Nuclear Testing in the Marshall Islands: A… Read More Mushroom cloud over Fangataufa atoll, French Polynesia, 1968
After the truth-shower 