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.
How the world banned the "walls of death" — and let a bigger problem take their place, out of sight, on the high seas
We departed Saldanha Bay, South Africa on the morning of 22 September 1987 — the southern spring equinox — aboard a 39-foot Bongers sloop my stepfather Gary had built in our
Within his first days in office, the new Prime Minister of Solomon Islands, Jeremiah Manele, signed an executive order reinstating the country's ban on the export of live
Bikini Atoll, in the northern Marshall Islands, was the site of 23 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States between 1946 and 1958. The Bikinian population — approximately 167 people