Fighting off rising seas without reducing humanity’s carbon emissions is like trying to drain a bathtub without turning off the tap. But increasingly, scientists are sounding the alarm on yet another problem compounding the crisis for coastal cities: Their land is also sinking, a phenomenon known as subsidence. The metaphorical tap is still on—as rapid … Read more
Like a nice wool blanket can help a human baby stay warm and healthy, so too does a baby white spruce get protection from a blanket of snow. At the same time, by preventing the chill of winter from reaching the ground, the snow blanket helps thaw permafrost, or frozen soil packed with ancient plant … Read more
A combination of AI, a wild 1970s plan to build underwater cities, and a designer creating furniture on the seabed around the Bahamas might be the solution to the widespread destruction of coral reefs. It could even save the world from coastal erosion. Industrial designer Tom Dixon and technologist Suhair Khan, founder of AI incubator … Read more
TEAHUPO’O, French Polynesia — In Teahupo’o, the ocean is the heart of village life. Boats bob in the lagoon in the south of Tahiti at sunrise before fishers start their day. Many set out early with poles or spears to catch fish gliding among the corals — fresh food for them, their families and their … Read more
So whatâs going on here? For one, the oceans have been steadily warming over the decades, absorbing something like 90 percent of the extra heat that humans have added to the atmosphere. âThe oceans are our saviors, in a way,â says biological oceanographer Francisco Chavez of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in California. âThings … Read more
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. When governments find themselves fighting the threat of coastal erosion, their default response tends to be pretty simple: If sand is disappearing from a beach, they pump in more sand to replace it. This strategy, known as “beach nourishment,” has become … Read more
Way up in the sky and sprinkled across the seas, two of the littlest yet most influential things in the world have stubbornly guarded their secrets: aerosols and phytoplankton. Today, NASA launched its Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean Ecosystem mission, or PACE, to unravel their mysteries. The mission’s findings could be a key to understanding how … Read more
ROTTERDAM, SOUTH HOLLAND, NETHERLANDS – 2022/02/08: The deep-sea creatures on board the Luciana and the mining vessel Hidden Gem seen in the background, during the demonstration. Ocean Rebellions protest The Deep Sea Says No Why the deep sea? The deep seabed is largely unexplored, many areas have unique marine life (an estimated 10-million life forms … Read more
For as long as David Cottrell could remember, his hometown had been falling into the sea. In the early 1960s, when Cottrell was 3 years old, an abandoned US Coast Guard station teetered over the water of the Pacific in North Cove, Washington. By the middle of the decade, the station was gone—as was a … Read more
The fillet of flounder sitting on your plate comes with a severe environmental cost. To catch it, a ship running on fossil fuels spewed greenhouse gases as it dragged a trawl net across the seafloor, devastating the ecosystems in its path. Obvious enough. But new research shows that the consequences extend even further: Trawl nets … Read more
