The body meant to govern deep-sea mining still has no rulebook. So one company stopped waiting for the world and went to Washington instead — and by July it could hold the first licence to mine the international seabed, entirely outside the system built to share it.
For years scientists assumed less Arctic ice would mean more life. A new study of two decades of data suggests the opposite — and that the ocean may have quietly passed the point of no return around 2009.
Five years, 550 scientists, 1,600 pages: the UN's new World Ocean Assessment is the most complete account yet of what we are doing to the sea. Its numbers are large, and most of them point one way.
Two empires are carving up the one part of the ocean that was meant to belong to everyone — and to everyone not yet born. The seafloor cannot be watched, which is exactly why it is being taken.
For the first time, machine learning is finding structure in the sounds whales make — an alphabet, even vowels. We still cannot say what any of it means, and some doubt the structure is real. But whether whales have language has become a question of data, not of poetry.
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.
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.