A coral reef the size of Vatican City. Twenty-eight new species. A cold seep, a whale fall, a phantom jellyfish. All discovered off the Argentine coast on a single expedition. Eighty percent of the world's ocean remains unmapped.
My experience buying a suggestive nut in the Seychelles.
A glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula collapsed faster than any modern observation has recorded. Scientists now know the mechanism. Whether the climate models that predict the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet account for it is a different question.
When the Iran war pushed global oil markets, the consequences reached Tuvalu — a country of 10,000 people, twenty-six square kilometres of land, and an ocean territory the size of Texas. Two weeks of emergency. Three sets of consequences. And a country preparing to host the world.
This spring, Britain convened forty nations to reopen a waterway America used to keep open. In the same months, Europe began drafting legal infrastructure to police dollar-denominated private payment systems. The architecture of the global system is being maintained by hands that did not build it.
For three decades the Pacific has been treated as the calm centre of the world. It is now the centre of the contest between the United States and China — and Australia, New Zealand, and the smaller island states find themselves caught between forces none of them can balance alone.
Colombia voted on Sunday in a first round that will send a Trump-aligned candidate against a leftist senator to a runoff later this month. Meanwhile, a nine-month U.S. military campaign of strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats off the South American coast has now killed over 200 people.
Sudan's civil war has produced the world's largest humanitarian catastrophe and continues. Next door, Ethiopia voted on Monday in an election expected to consolidate one-party rule. Two of Africa's most populous countries are pulling in opposite political directions while their region holds.
Three months after U.S. and Israeli strikes began the war with Iran, the April ceasefires technically remain in force. On the ground, in three countries, the fighting has not stopped — and this week the war widened again.
Three weeks after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency, the Bundibugyo-strain Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda has surpassed 360 confirmed cases and continues to grow. There is no approved vaccine for this strain of the virus.