On Sunday, October 23, the National Marine Sanctuary System turned 50. Since its founding, the system has protected more than 620,000 square miles of ocean and Great Lakes waters in 15 national marine sanctuaries and two marine national monuments.
Not only does the ghost fishing gear account for about 46 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a new study has found that the amount of commercial fishing line left in Earth’s oceans each year is enough to stretch to the moon and back, reported The Guardian.
A new study from University of Exeter has found that people who have positive experiences with blue spaces, like lakes, rivers or ponds, in childhood tend to have a better sense of well-being as adults.
The trillions of pieces of plastic that end up in Earth’s oceans each year are wreaking havoc on the hundreds of thousands of marine organisms who live there. Mammals like whales and smaller organisms like fish ingest plastic particles, which contain toxins that stay in the animals’ bodies and are passed along to the organisms […]
Coral reefs are some of the ecosystems most vulnerable to the climate crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that if global warming reaches even two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, 99 percent of them will die off. Yet these unique ecosystems, which currently only take up less than 0.1 percent of ocean […]
What began as an infestation could be a surprising nature-based solution to the plastic pollution crisis. In 2017, scientist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini found some unwanted intruders in one of her hives, wax-moth larvae that feed on beeswax. She took the worms out of her hive and placed them in a plastic bag. However, […]
The second-ever Trees & Seas Festival will run from September 16 to 25 with events, tree-plantings and beach cleans around the world. The festival is the brainchild of Plastic Oceans International, a U.S.-based nonprofit that works to combat ocean plastic pollution by empowering sustainable communities.
A UN agency has granted permission for a Canadian-based company to test out deep-sea mining. The Metals Company (TMC) announced on September 7 that the International Seabed Authority (ISA) had given its subsidiary Nauru Ocean Resources Inc (NORI) the go-ahead to gather 3,600 tonnes of polymetallic nodules from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, beginning […]