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 […]
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 […]
Ocean plastic has reached the northernmost ends of the earth. The remote and icy waters of the Arctic Ocean are also being inundated by this form of non-biodegradable pollution. According to a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, currents carrying trash, originating mostly from the North Atlantic, are flowing north into the Greenland […]
By Mikey Jane Moran “There are no cod left in Cape Cod,” said a New England chef with a shrug of his shoulders. And he really means no cod. The salty docks of Gloucester, Massachusetts—once the hub of American fishing culture, bustling with wind-blown fishermen hauling nets full of squirming fish—is nearly deserted. Due to […]
By David Pinsky The U.S. is the largest market for canned tuna in the world. U.S. consumers purchase countless cans and serve up thousands of tuna melts day after day. Today’s flashy labels and PR claims from supermarket and national tuna brands can be confusing and sometimes deceiving. Even worse, much of the canned tuna […]
Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans from Alaska, have introduced legislation to expand oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Ocean and Cook Inlet, putting fragile ecosystems and endangered wildlife at risk. In December, President Obama permanently protected large areas of U.S. waters in the Arctic from oil and gas drilling. The new […]
By Matt Blois More than 20 feet below the surface of the water, on the sandy sea floor between Cancún and Isla Mujeres in Mexico, a lobster takes refuge beneath a miniature concrete house. Scuba divers watch as the lobster slinks underneath the foundation. Farther on, hundreds of statues stand in tight circles. A little […]
Federal fishery managers voted Monday to keep the U.S. West Coast Pacific sardine fishery closed for the upcoming commercial season. With an estimated 86,586 metric tons (mt) of sardine remaining and 150,000 mt necessary for fishing to occur, this will be the third year in a row there are not enough sardines to support a […]