UN estimates indicate that Kiribati could disappear in just 30 or 40 years. That’s because the average elevation is less than two meters above sea level. And some of the knock-on effects of climate change have made the situation more difficult.
Ninety percent of the large fish that were here in the 1950s are now gone. One metric ton of plastic enters the ocean every four seconds. But the biggest problem, thanks largely to our insatiable appetite for fossil fuels, is that the ocean is heating up fast.
Octopus-hunting freedivers, mounds of shark fins, and a close encounter with a leopard seal are among the judges’ selections for Oceanographic Magazine’s ocean photography awards.
For more than a year, the team trying to reach the deepest point in every ocean faced challenges as timeless as bad weather and as novel as the equipment they invented. This is the story of the explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.
Ocean water is saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
At a time when Del Mar, Pacifica and other coastal cities are fighting to defend their homes and roads from the rising sea, Marina has embarked on a path less traveled. Here in this Army turned university town, residents are learning how to adjust with the ocean as the water moves inland.
On November 25, 2019, Chris Carney and his two-man crew, Pete Brown and Jun Sumiyama, set off from Japan on their way to Hawaii in a 42-foot sailboat. This is the story of how three crewmen lived more than a week in the middle of the Pacific in a wrecked sailboat with almost nothing.
Nauru, an island in the South Pacific, is known for its high rate of poverty and unemployment. Only a few decades ago, the island was listed among world’s richest countries while it was a major phosphate exporter but as the resources exhausted, the national systems started to fail.
When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in the Pacific Ocean in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller which sold tens of millions of copies.
Evidence of Cold War nuclear testing has made its way to the deepest reaches of the Pacific Ocean. The discovery of “bomb carbon” miles below the surface shows how deep human impact goes.
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s. President Joko Widodo plans to pick up and move the capital, along with 7 million people.
By 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean by weight, than fish. Plastic pollution is definitely one of the largest threats our oceans face today. Meet the engineers who are using rubbish-guzzling boats to stem the flow at its source.
Science fiction obsessed Victor Vescovo wanted to be the first person to reach the deepest points of all five oceans – but first he had to build a submarine that was up to it.
Malibu homeowners banded together to address sea level rise. A decade later, they are at war with the city, the surfers, and each other. The choices are clear: Do nothing and lose the coast. Stall by dredging in sand, bouldering up revetments and emergency sea walls. Or look at long-term solutions.
Offshore oil rigs are inherently a higher-cost, higher-risk method of oil extraction, but the oceans are, of course, home to a huge proportion of the world’s oil reserves so, if there are no more low-cost oilfields on land, that’s where the companies go.
