Britain’s Prince Charles is lending his clout to a $2 million competition to stop the 8 million tonnes of plastics entering our oceans each year. The Prince of Wales has teamed up with Dame Ellen MacArthur and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt to launch the New Plastics Economy Innovation Prize to encourage the world’s brightest minds to […]
By Tim Radford U.S. scientists who have been warning that warmer oceans are more likely to be poorer in dissolved oxygen have now sounded the alarm: ocean oxygen levels are indeed falling, and seemingly falling faster than the corresponding rise in water temperature. That colder water can hold more dissolved gas than warmer water is […]
The Ocean Cleanup—the ambitious Dutch venture devoted to ridding the world’s oceans of plastics—announced this week that it has raised $21.7 million in donations since last November. This latest round of funding brings The Ocean Cleanup’s total funding since 2013 to $31.5 million and allows the startup to initiate large-scale trials of its cleanup technology […]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Thursday it is investigating the unusually high number of humpback whale deaths off the U.S. Atlantic Coast. A total of 41 humpback whales died in the waters off Maine to North Carolina since January 2016, including 15 that washed up dead this year. That’s about three times […]
President Trump plans to sign an executive order today intended to aggressively expand drilling in protected waters off the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. The new EO will direct U.S. Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke to review the current offshore drilling plans, which limits most drilling to parts of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s Cook Inlet, […]
By Jonathan Hahn On President Trump’s first Earth Day in the White House, he declared on Twitter that “we celebrate our beautiful forests, lakes and lands”—an amiable if blasé arm-punch to the planet from the leader of the free world. Until a few hours later that is, when the president resorted to his usual right […]
A research team discovered that the caterpillars of the greater wax moth—considered a pest in Europe because it eats the beeswax from honeycombs—also has the ability to biodegrade polyethylene, the same material used in whale-choking, landfill-clogging plastic shopping bags. Incredibly, this discovery was all down to chance. Scientist and amateur beekeeper Federica Bertocchini of Spain’s […]
President Trump is poised to threaten more than 1 billion acres of national monument protection in a devastating and unprecedented attack on America’s public lands and oceans. Trump is expected to issue an executive order April 26 calling for a review of every national monument that’s been protected by presidential proclamation since 1996. His goal […]
By Tim Radford Scientists poring over military and satellite imagery have mapped the unimaginable: a network of rivers, streams, ponds, lakes and even a waterfall, flowing over the ice shelf of a continent with an annual mean temperature of more than -50C. In 1909 Ernest Shackleton and his fellow explorers on their way to the […]