Tag Archives: oceans

Anywhere else in the world, more trees would be a blessing. But in the far north of Alaska, they’re a reckoning. As the Arctic warms up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, white spruce trees are now spreading into tundra that was once inhospitable. Bully …

A combination of AI, a wild 1970s plan to build underwater cities, and a designer creating furniture on the seabed around the Bahamas might be the solution to the widespread destruction of coral reefs. It could even save the world from coastal erosion. Industrial designer Tom Dixon and technologist Suhair …

For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs, and have stayed that way since. You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known …

Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be …

The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its path. Obvious enough. But new research shows that the consequences …

For as long as David Cottrell could remember, his hometown had been falling into the sea. In the early 1960s, when Cottrell was 3 years old, an abandoned US Coast Guard station teetered over the water of the Pacific in North Cove, Washington. By the middle of the decade, the …

The robot about to be let loose on the Norwegian seabed looks like a giant tripod, kicking up sand as it drills to collect samples from one of the last untouched places on Earth. This eerie contraption belongs to Loke Marine Minerals, expected to be among the first companies to …

The Norwegian Parliament voted this week to allow companies to scour its territorial waters for mining opportunities. The decision is a historic event: While some exploration has taken place in international waters in the Pacific, Norway is the first country to open its continental shelf up to deep-sea mining. Environmental …

Following a summer and autumn of planetary extremes—the hottest September by a wide margin, supercharged hurricanes, self-perpetuating heat domes—scientists have now declared 2023 the warmest year on record. Today the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2023 report, finding that last year was 1.35 degrees Celsius above the …