Black tar balls and oil sludge have surfaced this week on the famed beaches of Goa, the small Indian state so beloved by the day-glowed ravers of yesteryear. According to the AP, pudding-like oil deposits some six inches deep have soiled popular beaches like Colva, Candolim and Calangute, the likes of which draw millions of tourists …
Oceans
Oceans: Swimming Among the Sargassum
Our trip’s timing to Bermuda this week couldn’t have been much more fortuitous. We arrived just as Hurricane Danielle was running out of steam after whipping Bermuda with high waves, and Hurricane Earle to the east is likely to make conditions rough by the end of the week. But right now, as we depart on the Explorer—myself, the …
Oceans: Saving Our Coral Reefs
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece on the worrying bleaching events ocurring to coral reefs around the world, thanks largely to warming ocean temperatures. Though the sudden bleachings we’re seeing in places like Indonesia immediately have to do with unusually warm water temperatures caused in part by this year’s El Nino, …
Oceans: On Bermuda
I’m on the road again—or in this case, the high seas. I’ll be spending this week in and around the Atlantic island of Bermuda with Her Deepness, Sylvia Earle—the famed American oceanographer I can best describe as America’s Jacques Cousteau. As I’ve written before, the 75-year-old Earle—who has spent her career exploring the …
Oceans: Defending Dolphin Killing
The Associated Press has a nifty exclusive: an interview with the mayor of the Japanese town of Taiji. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because you’ve seen The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary that details the dolphin slaughter carried out by the residents of the village. Though The Cove makes it seem as if the dolphin hunt is …
Oil Spill: What’s Going On Under the Gulf?
With the coastal cleanup apparently downshifting and BP in the final stages of preparing for a static kill operation to help close the well, we may all soon need something new to obsess/post about. But the battle on the spill is actually just shifting fronts—from the Gulf coast and wetlands that have been the focus of coverage and …
Getting to Know What’s in Your Ocean
Every so often we get a glimpse — a transluscent body with a glowing orb hanging off its forehead, or this dragonfish, with teeth on its tongue and jaws that look like they could take your arm off. These missives from our oceans’ depths are as captivating as they are few and far between – the fruit of long, expensive forays to
…
Developing a (Slightly) More Organized Ocean Policy
The Gulf oil spill is a visceral example—a sticky and black one—of how dysfunctional our national policy on oceans and shorelines really is. In granting energy companies leases to drill ever deeper in the Gulf of Mexico, the Department of the Interior seemed to give little thought to how a blown well might impact the region’s …
The Oil Has Stopped—for Now
The numbers tell the story better than anything else could: after 85 days, 16 hours and 25 minutes, oil at last stopped flowing from BP’s busted well in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the evening of April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, between 93.5 million and 184.3 million gallons of crude have been spilled—blowing the …
A Virus Threatens Farmed Salmon
The future of fish—at least the sort that end up on our dinner plates—is not in the ocean. As we’ve steadily overfished the seas, the stock of wild fish have been declining fast. Only around 25% of commercial stocks are in a reasonably healthy state, and some 30% of fish stocks are already considered collapsed. A famous study that …