July 27, 2020 By Laura Millan Lombrana, Anna Shiryaevskaya, Dina Khrennikova, Olga Tanas, and Mira Rojanasakul Bloomberg
Freaked out scientists and gleeful captains of fossil-fuel tankers are now sailing through climate history in the melting polar region.
July 25, 2020 By Heather Murphy The New York Times
Sprinkled across the ocean floor, invisible from the surface, are hundreds — or maybe thousands — of sink holes. These “blue holes,” as scientists call them, do not swallow up everything incapable of fighting their gravitational force, like their black hole cousins. But to those who study them, they are still nearly as intriguing.
July 24, 2020 By Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis The Washington Post
Trump officials concluded Friday that a proposed gold and copper mine in Alaska — which would be the largest in North America — would not pose serious environmental risks, a sharp reversal from a finding by the Obama administration that it would permanently harm the region’s prized sockeye salmon.
July 23, 2020 By Laura Parker National Geographic
The amount of plastic trash that flows into the oceans every year is expected to nearly triple by 2040 to 29 million metric tons. That single, incomprehensibly large statistic is at the center of a new two-year research project that both illuminates the failure of the worldwide campaign to curb plastic pollution and prescribes an ambitious plan for reducing much of that flow into the seas.
July 22, 2020 By Ian Urbina NBC News
The battered wooden “ghost boats” drift through the Sea of Japan for months, their only cargo the corpses of starved North Korean fishermen whose bodies have been reduced to skeletons. Last year more than 150 of these macabre vessels washed ashore in Japan, and there have been more than 500 in the past five years.