On Nov. 7, French President Emmanuel Macron announced at the COP27 climate summit in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, that France is calling for a complete ban on deep-sea mining. This marks…
On Nov. 4, the 41st annual meeting of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) closed without making significant progress toward the establishment of new marine…
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay/PUNTA ARENAS, Chile/PORDENONE, Italy — A mountain of krill meal has been packed inside a huge warehouse: divided into bags and stacked in hundreds of piles that stretch almost…
Sea turtles lumber from ocean to shore to lay their eggs in the sand. In some places, this effort is protected by humans who patrol beaches on foot, warding off…
The idea is simple but ambitious: protect the ocean by giving it the same kind of rights a person might have. No such legal mechanism is currently in place, but…
DAKAR — A fishers’ collective called Taxawu Cayar has brought a case before the Senegalese courts to demand the closure of a fishmeal factory in the Grande Côte area, around…
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government has launched a program that will pay thousands of traditional fishers to collect plastic trash from the sea. The four-week initiative is part of wider…
Editor's note: Following the publication of this podcast, Spain’s Minister of Fisheries announced that the EC will allow Spanish trawlers to fish in 41 of the 87 areas where it is…
The trillions of pieces of plastic currently roving through the global ocean are known to be an assault on life. Turtles get tangled up in discarded plastic fishing nets. Whales…
Unstudied at sea until recently, this huge, fast-moving ocean current may hold a key to resolving climate change uncertainties. But doing remote research in southern oceans poses financial, data gathering, and unexpected challenges.
Small- and large-scale fishers report an increase in the volume and variety of fish species in the Patos Lagoon and the coast of Rio Grande do Sul state. Such abundance came after a bill banning motorized trawling on the state’s coast was passed and signed into law in 2018. Drafted by fishers and scientists and passed unanimously in the state parliament, the law goes against the interests of President Bolsonaro’s allies.
BRUSSELS — On Sept. 15, the European Commission made a historic announcement: it will prohibit bottom fishing across 16,000 square kilometers, or 6,200 square miles — an area about half…
On Sept. 14, the Hidden Gem — an industrial drill ship operated by a subsidiary of The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian deep-sea mining corporation — left its port in…
Hours after being born, oysters are already working to form their protective, chalk-layered shells. Drawing calcium and carbonate from seawater, they combine the two to form hardened shells. But as…
U.N. member states came tantalizingly close to sealing a deal for a high-stakes, legally binding treaty to conserve biodiversity on the high seas, areas beyond national jurisdiction that comprise two-thirds…
JAKARTA — The Citarum River that skirts the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, is infamous as the most polluted river on Earth. The rivers inside Jakarta aren’t in much better state, either,…
A new study has found that nearly 90% of assessed marine life will be at high or critical risk by the year 2100 if climate change accelerates along a high-emissions…
Antarctic krill — tiny, filter-feeding crustaceans that live in the Southern Ocean — have long existed in mind-boggling numbers. A 2009 study estimated that the species has a biomass of…
It starts with tiny deep-sea fragments — shark’s teeth or slivers of shell. Then, in a process thought to span millions of years, they get coated in layers of liquidized…
A new model that links climate change-reduced oceanic oxygen levels to smaller ectotherms predicts marine microorganisms could shrink as the world gets warmer, with impacts up the food chain, impacting fisheries.
Delegates of the International Seabed Authority are currently meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, to negotiate a set of rules that would pave the way for a controversial activity: mining the seabed…
In late June, New Zealand parliamentarian and Māori activist Debbie Ngarewa-Packer boarded an international flight to begin a 40-hour journey to Lisbon to attend the U.N. Ocean Conference. At various…
Earth’s vast underwater kelp forests are a vital source of food, pharmaceuticals, and more, while storing huge amounts of carbon. These undersea forests are also at risk, but researchers are working to restore them.
In 2004, Charles Clover published a book called The End of the Line that painted a dismal view of our oceans due to rampant overfishing. The book, as well as…
Between 1869 and 1870, the H.M.S. Porcupine sailed into the North Atlantic Ocean and scraped a dredge along the seafloor. When the sailors pulled the dredge back to the surface,…
China’s distant-water fishing fleet eclipses that of other nations, and so does its rap sheet, according to the authors of a recent report based mainly on data released by China.…
In the past, ocean carbon data was sparse, mostly gathered by ships. But the future of monitoring belongs to robot floats that deliver real-time data across vast oceans — even in the remote Antarctic Southern Ocean.
International delegates representing governments, businesses, academic and research institutions, civil society, youth leaders and philanthropic organizations announced major commitments worth more than $16 billion to protect ocean health at the…
With a four-page letter, the Pacific island nation of Nauru pushed the world closer to a reality in which large-scale mining doesn’t just take place on land, but also in…
In 2017, a dugong washed ashore on a beach north of Townsville, Queensland, near the Great Barrier Reef. The dead animal had scratch marks on its belly and back, and…