Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
One autumn, a narwhal swimming up Nordvestfjord, a long, ice-covered arm of water in East Greenland, dove down through the cold surface layer into the warmer, saltier water beneath it. Behind the…
Take every stretch of open ocean outside the polar seas, average the surface temperature across all of it, and the number you get has a season of its own. It is not the season most people live in. It…
On any beach, the sea spends the day walking up the sand and back down again. To the people who use satellites to track eroding coastlines, that walk is a nuisance: before an image of a waterline can…
Most of the plastic that enters the ocean does not stay at sea. It comes back to land, washing onto beaches, piling up in mangroves, fouling the same coastlines it drifted away from. The hard…
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…
The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…