Published by Ocean Conservancy Just in time for World Wetlands Day 2018, we’ve got some of the coolest, wildest facts about these incredibly fertile and diversity-rich ecosystems. From the marshes of the Gulf to the Great Dismal Swamp, some of our most fascinating natural wonders may lie in some of the most unexpected places. While celebrating […]
Published by the World Wildlife Fund Wetlands—places where the land is covered by water, either salt, fresh, or somewhere in between—cover just over 6% of the Earth’s land surface. Sprinkled throughout every continent except Antarctica, they provide food, clean drinking water, and refuge for countless people and animals around the world. Despite their global significance, an […]
Published by the World Wildlife Fund Wetlands—places where the land is covered by water, either salt, fresh, or somewhere in between—cover just over 6% of the Earth’s land surface. Sprinkled throughout every continent except Antarctica, they provide food, clean drinking water, and refuge for countless people and animals around the world. Despite their global significance, an […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy Here at Ocean Conservancy, we get countless requests for all things sea-related—including our best book recommendations for ocean lovers. The beginning of January is the perfect time to curl up with a warm cup of coffee or hot chocolate and a start a new book (or three), and Ocean Conservancy’s staff has […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund This is the third year I’ve compiled an annual climate change reading list and it’s the hardest one I’ve put together yet. The year 2017 has served up so many books, reports, and news stories that merit consideration, it’s been hard to narrow it down. The amount of […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Co-authored by Alex Hillbrand The world returns to Montreal this week to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the treaty that saved the ozone layer. The ozone hole over Antarctica is beginning to close, and a massive global epidemic of skin cancer was averted, thanks […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund This year, Adélies had to travel across more sea ice than usual to reach their feeding grounds. Andrew Shiva via Wikimedia Commons An enormous colony of Adélie penguins—around 40,000 of them—lives in eastern Antarctica. Scientists have been observing these flightless birds since the 1960s, and each year between […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Justin Brice Guariglia in Greenland Courtesy of the artist © 2016 New York–based artist Justin Brice Guariglia wears his feelings about climate change on his sleeves—quite literally. A tattoo running the length of his right arm depicts global temperature rise from 1880 to 2016. The ink on his […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy The following is a guest blog from Dr. Chelsea Rochman, who is currently an Assistant Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. Lately, there has been a lot of news about marine debris, specifically plastic, being discovered in remote corners of the Earth. Plastics have been found near the […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Vivienne Flesher Let’s be honest, climate warriors. In the wake of President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, his ongoing assault on our environmental safeguards, and the recent dramatic events in Antarctica, it’s likely that your armor feels just a bit flimsy. How much more of […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund White Wanderer rendering Courtesy of Luftwerk You’ve probably already seen the shocking satellite and aerial views of the Larsen C ice shelf’s 120-mile-long fracture by now, along with the Delaware-size iceberg it spawned in July. We watch these far-flung Antarctic images flit across our screens and social media […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy As vessel traffic increases in Arctic waters, so does the chance of oil spills. While an oil spill of any kind would have negative impacts, a spill of heavy fuel oil (HFO)—a viscous, sticky residual fuel used by many large vessels—would be especially devastating to the marine ecosystem. Just last month, an […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy Today, we celebrate the extraordinary service of the United States Coast Guard as it marks 227 years of protecting the safety, security and environment of over 100,000 miles of U.S. coastline and waterways. They not only safeguard the largest Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in the world, they are also on the frontlines […]
Published by the Environmental News Service GREENBELT, Maryland, July 13, 2017 (ENS) – An iceberg weighing one trillion metric tonnes, one of the largest ever recorded, calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica sometime between July 10 and July 12 in what NASA classifies as a sign of global climate change. Read […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy Today, an iceberg the size of Delaware broke away from the Antarctic Peninsula. Let that sink in for a moment. More than a trillion (1,000,000,000,000) metric tons of ice—one of the largest icebergs in history—just broke free from Antarctica. This is one of many signs of how drastically this ecosystem is changing. […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Seismic airguns exploding in the ocean in search for oil and gas have devastating impacts on zooplankton, which are critical food sources for marine mammals, according to a new study in Nature. The blasting decimates one of the ocean’s most vital groups of organisms over huge areas and […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund The scientific and economic case for climate action grows only more compelling. Over the past decade, scientists have developed an increasingly firm understanding of the links between climate change and public health, agriculture, transportation and infrastructure, and extreme weather. As one example, exceptionally heavy rains and flash floods […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy As we’ve learned, nowhere is immune to marine debris. From the sweeping vistas of Antarctica to the uninhabited island of Midway Atoll, ocean pollution is everywhere—showing that the consequences of trash extend far beyond what we see on our local beaches. But the big question is how? How does trash end up […]
Published by the Natural Resources Defense Fund Ed Dunens/Flickr Nearly 400 miles above earth, there’s a hunk of metal taller than an elephant and heavier than a rhino. It’s a privately operated satellite named WorldView-3 that’s been orbiting the planet every 97 minutes since 2014, taking tens of thousands of high-resolution pictures as it rips […]
Published by Ocean Conservancy Another study has just come out—revealing that plastic pollution has been discovered in deep-sea sediments and surface waters in the Antarctic marine ecosystem. The similarities between this research and the study I wrote about earlier in the week on plastics in the Arctic are very troubling. Plastic pollution has now been documented […]