A study published Wednesday had some frightening news for the Great Barrier Reef—the iconic marine ecosystem is at “unprecedented” risk of collapse due to climate change after a 2016 heat wave led to the largest mass coral bleaching event in the reef’s history. But another study published Thursday in PLOS Genetics offers some hope: Corals […]
A burst undersea pipeline owned by Indonesian state-owned oil and natural gas corporation Pertamina caused a deadly oil spill on Saturday that left Balikpapan Bay in Borneo “like a gas station.” The company initially said the disaster had nothing to do with its nearby refinery or undersea pipelines that run across the bay, noting that […]
In response to a legal victory by the Center for Biological Diversity, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today gave Endangered Species Act protection to a freshwater mussel that lives in Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia. The yellow lance is threatened by pollution from agriculture, logging and urban development, as well as by climate change. […]
In defiance of international protests, Japanese whaling vessels returned to port with another 333 minke whales on Saturday after its months-long hunt in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary in Antarctic waters. According to the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, among the whales collected, 152 were male and 181 were female. About 60 percent of the […]
Last year, China—the world’s largest importer of waste—announced it no longer wanted to take in other countries’ trash so it could focus on its own pollution problems. This unexpected policy shift, which took effect Jan. 1, has left exporters in the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Germany and other European countries scrambling for solutions for their growing […]
By Maia Danks The U.S. military has plans to create genetically modified marine organisms that can be used as underwater spies for the military. Fantastic as this idea may seem, the Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has actually launched a new program that aims to tap into the “natural sensing […]
More than 150 short-finned pilot whales stranded en masse at Hamelin Bay on the west coast of Australia early Friday morning. Most of the whales did not survive after beaching themselves, according to Jeremy Chick, incident controller at Western Australia’s Parks & Wildlife Service. Roughly 100 authorities and trained volunteers raced to save the 15 […]
The Trump administration is holding the biggest offshore oil and gas lease auction in U.S. history Wednesday, offering all 77 million acres of unleased, available federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The sale comes as administration officials seek to rescind drilling safety rules approved after the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, reduce royalties paid by […]
A notorious Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish poaching vessel, famous for plundering the Antarctic, was arrested on March 13 in waters belonging to the West African state of Liberia by the Liberian Coast Guard, with assistance from the marine conservation group Sea Shepherd. The F/V Hai Lung, known to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic […]