Ocean Crisis News

In 2007, a submersible with a large drill descended 1,600 meters (5,250 feet) into the sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG), landing near a network of hydrothermal…

Sail 200 nautical miles, or 370 kilometers, from any coastline, and you’ll enter a region called the “high seas,” beyond the control of any country. While many people never get…

Each winter, southern right whales and humpback whales migrate to the waters off Brazil to feed on krill and phytoplankton, and to give birth to their young among the country’s…

In 2013, Demian Chapman ambled down the streets in the Sheung Wan district in Hong Kong, where thousands of yellowed shark fins were drying on the sidewalk, or packed in…

A microplastic is a tiny speck of a thing. At its largest, it’s about the size of a linseed, but smaller microplastics can’t be seen with the naked eye. Minuscule…

In 2018, Lauren Biermann was scouring a satellite image of the ocean off the coast of the Isle of May, Scotland, searching for signs of floating seaweed for a project…

In March, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef suffered its most widespread bleaching event to date. Sixty percent of the reef underwent moderate to severe bleaching, and some corals may never recover.…

The future for the world’s oceans often looks grim. Fisheries are set to collapse by 2048, according to one study, and 8 million tons of plastic pollute the ocean every…

MISAMIS ORIENTAL, Philippines — For hundreds of years, the lives of fisherfolk along the sleepy coastal villages in the town of Candiis in the Philippines’ Misamis Oriental province have been…

BALI, Indonesia — It’s just after sunrise here in Bali, and a group of locals are preparing to sail their wooden boats out to a bay off Nusa Lembongan, a…

BOSTON/JAKARTA — It had rained all morning across Jakarta on the first Tuesday in February. The rivers in the Indonesian capital quickly filled up, carrying all kinds of debris toward…

BALI, Indonesia — Waves roll in over the black volcanic sand on Sogsogan, a beach in southern Bali. Further out, surfers prepare to master the swell. Bali has long been…

Nearly three months after the spill first impacted Brazil’s coast, debate goes on over its source; now investigators using satellite data think they have found it; others aren’t so sure.

A spill that coated Brazilian beaches with some 4,000 tons of oil is still a mystery, with critics blasting the Bolsonaro government’s weak response and secrecy of its investigation.

On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast, we speak with deep sea biologist Diva Amon about what we know (and don’t know) about biodiversity at the bottom of the ocean.…

JAKARTA — A ban on single-use plastics on the Indonesian island of Bali will stay in place, after the country’s top court rejected a challenge by the plastic-recycling industry. The…

Some of the countries most responsible for the plastic waste that ends up in the oceans have pledged to tackle the problem together, but activists say they’re focusing on the…

Illegal fishing, overfishing and pollution are common problems in the waters of South America. But the overarching problem, the one that enables the rest, is weak governance, according to experts.…

JAKARTA — Two ships have been spotted allegedly dumping waste oil in the sea off the eastern coast of Sumatra, highlighting what activists say is poor enforcement against marine pollution…

Earth’s oceans are drowning in plastic. Humans created 311 million metric tons of the stuff in 2014, and it is expected that we’ll be making four times as much by…

For thousands of years, people of the Lummi Nation in Washington state have treasured their deep connection to the orca pods that populate the waters of the Salish Sea. It’s…

Global climate change is impacting Earth’s oceans in a number of ways, from higher water temperatures and rising sea levels to acidification and oxygen depletion. Now, scientists have reported another…

2017 currently holds the record for hottest ocean temperatures, but, according to a new study, 2018 is likely to take the top spot as hottest year on record for Earth’s…

Women of childbearing age from small-island states and countries have been found to have toxic levels of mercury, a potent neurotoxin that can harm unborn children, a new report shows.…

MANILA, Philippines — Freedom Island is drowning in garbage. The last coastal frontier in the Philippine capital provides refuge to migratory birds and a thick mangrove forest there serves as…

New research finds that the mass bleaching event that led to the death of 30 percent of shallow-water corals on the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 also had a substantial…

On the morning of March 1, 1954, the United States tested its largest thermonuclear bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Code-named “Castle Bravo”, the explosion was more than…

"We need to keep this river clean,” says Muhammad Yusuf, a fisheries official from Padang, the capital of the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. “We’ve got to keep people from…

Shark-fishing outfits have for decades been catching dolphins, seals and other sea mammals to use as bait, helping drive some of those species closer to extinction, researchers have found. In…

Much of the fishing that takes place in international waters would be unprofitable without the billions of dollars in subsidies pumped in by governments to sustain the ecologically destructive industry,…