Journalism

KINGSTON — “All of this was mangroves,” says marine scientist Mona Webber, pointing toward a line of ghostly gray boulders separating the road from the sea. We’re standing on the side of Norman Manley Highway, a raised road that squiggles along a spit of sand known as the Palisadoes and connects Jamaica’s Norman Manley International Airport with the capital of Kingston. Webber — tall, animated, and wearing a polo shirt emblazoned with the logo of her workplace, the University of [...]

KINGSTON, Jamaica — On July 21, nations reached an agreement that will make it more difficult for deep-sea mining to start immediately in international waters, while not fully halting the industry’s progress. For the past two weeks, council members of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN-affiliated deep-sea mining regulator, have been meeting in Kingston, Jamaica, to negotiate a set of rules that would govern seabed mining in international waters. This proposed activity would excavate the ocean floor for [...]

Riding his bike to work in the Netherlands’ Zeeland province, Tjeerd Bouma passed fields of pear and apple trees. His mind wandered. As a coastal ecologist at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ), Bouma had been searching for a material with which to create artificial reefs in the Wadden Sea, a system of intertidal sand and mud flats that’s been heavily modified by humans over thousands of years. He realized that pear trees could be used for [...]

I am meandering around curving wetlands sprawled across a septet of islands. The wind blows hard, but a babel of birds dominates the soundscape: Screaming gulls, whistling plovers and deep-bass-thumping bitterns. A tern hovers over the water like an arabesque dancer before diving to snap up a small fish. Reedlings—tiny, egg-shaped birds—cling to the stalks of swaying marsh reeds. Blue-gray water ripples with avocets, long-tailed ducks, and even a couple of flamingos. The islands thrum with life. It’s hard to [...]

The nation’s Ministry of Petroleum and Energy has proposed opening up a 329,000-square-kilometer (127,000-square-mile) portion of the Norwegian Sea to deep-sea mining, an area nearly the size of Germany. The region overlaps with many marine areas previously flagged by Norwegian research institutes and government agencies as vulnerable or valuable. A study by the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate (NPD), a government agency responsible for regulating petroleum resources, found that this area holds significant quantities of minerals such as magnesium, cobalt, copper, nickel and rare-earth metals. [...]

Biodiversity. When you hear this word, what do you picture? Iconic animals like African elephants, gray wolves and humpback whales? Or multicolored coral species that make up a reef system? Or bacteria and microbes that regulate nutrients in the soil, or oxygen-releasing phytoplankton that live in the ocean’s sunlit zones? While biodiversity does embrace all these living things, the concept extends beyond mere species diversity or abundance. It also encompasses the infinite variety of genes that allow animals and [...]

On Sept. 14, the Hidden Gem — an industrial drill ship operated by a subsidiary of The Metals Company (TMC), a Canadian deep-sea mining corporation — left its port in Manzanillo, Mexico. From there, it headed toward the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a vast abyssal plain in international waters of the Pacific Ocean that stretches over 4.5 million square kilometers (1.7 million square miles) across the deep sea, roughly equivalent in size to half of Canada. The goal of TMC’s [...]

The fires were still several miles away, but Talía Zamboni and her colleagues wanted to work fast. Early in the morning on Feb. 23, they traveled to San Alonso Island in Argentina’s Iberá National Park, where several giant river otters were being housed in a large enclosure, awaiting their release into the wild. But today wasn’t the day they’d be let loose. When the otters turned up at their usual spot for food, Zamboni and her colleagues ushered them [...]

For years, Joaquim Garrabou donned scuba gear and dove into the waters of the Scandola Marine Reserve in Corsica to find a paradise. Twenty meters (66 feet) beneath the surface, there were reef walls draped with soft red coral (Corallium rubrum) and red gorgonian sea-whips (Paramuricea clavata), all swarming with fish and other sea creatures. But in 2003, a marine heat wave hit Scandola, leading to the death of many coral reefs. More than 15 years later, the reefs have [...]