Category Archives: Oceans

More than 100 nations take action to save oceans from human harm

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Envoys at Brest summit sign up to measures to tackle fight against illegal fishing and cut pollution

Representatives from more than 100 countries have committed to measures aimed at preserving the ocean from human harm, including stepping up the fight against illegal fishing, cutting plastic pollution and better protecting international waters.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, hosting the high-level session of the One Ocean summit on Friday, said 2022 was “a decisive year, and we should take here, in Brest, clear and firm commitments.”

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‘Blue diplomacy’: France summit puts world’s spotlight on oceans

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As One Ocean event in Brest aims to deliver action in areas from pollution to overfishing, activists warn against ‘bluewashing’

Up to 40 world leaders are due to make “ambitious and concrete commitments” towards combating illegal fishing, decarbonising shipping and reducing plastic pollution at what is billed as the first high-level summit dedicated to the ocean.

One Ocean summit, which opens on Wednesday in the French port of Brest, aims to mobilise “unprecedented international political engagement” for a wide range of pressing maritime issues, said its chief organiser, Olivier Poivre d’Arvor.

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How ‘super-enzymes’ that eat plastics could curb our waste problem

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Nudged along by scientists and evolution, micro-organisms that digest plastics have the potential to create an efficient method of recycling

Beaches littered with plastic bottles and wrappers. Marine turtles, their stomachs filled with fragments of plastic. Plastic fishing nets dumped at sea where they can throttle unsuspecting animals. And far out in the Pacific Ocean, an expanse of water more than twice the size of France littered with plastic waste weighing at least 79,000 tonnes.

The plastic pollution problem is distressingly familiar, but many organisations are working to reduce it. Alongside familiar solutions such as recycling, a surprising ally has emerged: micro-organisms. A handful of microbes have evolved the ability to “eat” certain plastics, breaking them down into their component molecules. These tiny organisms could soon play a key role in reducing plastic waste and building a greener economy.

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Super corals: the race to save the world’s reefs from the climate crisis – in pictures

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Few corals are safe from warming oceans, a new study warns, but studies are finding surprisingly hardy corals, natural sunscreens and how coral ‘IVF’ can regrow reefs

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Extreme heat in oceans ‘passed point of no return’ in 2014

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Formerly rare high temperatures now covering half of seas and devastating wildlife, study shows

Extreme heat in the world’s oceans passed the “point of no return” in 2014 and has become the new normal, according to research.

Scientists analysed sea surface temperatures over the last 150 years, which have risen because of global heating. They found that extreme temperatures occurring just 2% of the time a century ago have occurred at least 50% of the time across the global ocean since 2014.

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‘A national tragedy’: Māori drowning rate causes alarm in New Zealand

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Māori have a strong ancestral relationship to the ocean involving hunting and fishing for seafood, but that can come at a cost

Aquatic safety instructor Clayton Wikaira is leaning against a small inflatable boat, his hair wet from the sea, speaking to a group of six university students who have just learned how to safely dive for kaimoana (seafood). The students’ attention is waning in the hot midday sun – they are tired from an early morning start, a hike around the rocks of Auckland’s Whangaparaoa peninsula, and hours spent diving in the open ocean for kina (sea urchin). Some look at their phones, others chomp on pizza. But as he starts telling a story, their ears prick up.

“I thought I could swim to Australia when I was young. I thought I was fit, strong,” he starts.

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Orcas recorded killing and feeding on blue whales in brutal attacks

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Research is first to document coordinated female-led pods ramming world’s largest animal and eating its tongue before it dies

From snatching sea lions off beaches to stunning fish with a strike of their tails, orcas are renowned for their highly specialised hunting techniques passed down over generations. Now, for the first time, killer whales have been recorded hunting the planet’s largest animal – the blue whale – in coordinated and brutal attacks.

Female-led pods of killer whales, also known as orcas, have been recorded killing and eating blue whales in three separate attacks off the coast of Australia since 2019, according to a paper published in Marine Mammal Science.

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Coral crusaders: Costa Rica’s young divers learn to protect their seas

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In Puerto Viejo, scuba diving was once just for tourists, but a centre is training young people with few opportunities to care for the ocean on their doorstep

“I put fresh almond leaves in your underwater masks as anti-fogging – a way to avoid using chemicals. You can remove them once in the water, just before diving,” says Salim Vasquez, 14, pushing her dreadlocks away from her mask.

She distributes the equipment to her fellow divers, who are aged between 14 and 24, and Ana María Arenas, a group coordinator. It is 8am on a cloudy Sunday morning in Puerto Viejo, a Jamaican-inspired city in the south of Costa Rica. The young conservationists are preparing to dive into the Caribbean water for their weekly reef monitoring.

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‘It’s mind-boggling’: the hidden cost of our obsession with fish oil pills

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The market in this prized commodity is worth billions – but are the supposed benefits worth the cost to global ecosystems?

• Revealed: many common omega-3 fish oil supplements are ‘rancid’

Scanning the shelves and internet for fish oil is a dizzying task. There are dozens of brands available and, although the typical consideration for the popular supplement is that quality matters most, it is not the only factor.

These prized products travel a long way before being labelled as “pure” and “fresh” – starting with the industrial-scale grinding down of a tiny fish that is crucial for healthy ocean and food systems.

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Huge icefish colony of 60m nests found on Antarctic seabed – video

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Researchers exploring Antarctica’s seabed have discovered a thriving, unprecedented colony of icefish 'about a third of the size of London'. 'We expected to see the normal Antarctic seafloor … [but] during the first four hours of our dive, we saw nothing but fish nests,' said Autun Purser, of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, and lead author of the study published in Current Biology.

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Meet Mr Trash Wheel – and the other ingenious tools that eat river plastic

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From ‘bubble barriers’ to floating drones, a host of new projects aim to stop plastic pollution before it ever reaches the ocean

The Great Bubble Barrier is just that – a wall of bubbles. It gurgles across the water in a diagonal screen, pushing plastic to one side while allowing fish and other wildlife to pass unharmed.

The technology, created by a Dutch firm and already being used in Amsterdam, is being trialled in the Douro River in Porto, Portugal, as part of the EU-supported Maelstrom (marine litter sustainable removal and management) project.

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Plastic beads could make nets more visible to cetaceans, scientists say

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Beads add hardly any extra weight to fishing gear and could save thousands of lives, it is claimed

Simple plastic beads could save the lives of some of the thousands of porpoises and other cetaceans that get caught in fishing nets each year, scientists say.

Harbour porpoises use echolocation to find their prey and for orientation. However, their acoustic signals cannot pick up the mesh of a gillnet, and as a result they often become trapped.

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I spent my house deposit on a boat to reach the Mokohinau Islands – the magic on our doorstep | Clarke Gayford

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It wasn’t a financially astute move but it led to my TV series and helped me discover the truly important things in life

  • Guardian writers and readers describe their favourite place in New Zealand’s wilderness and why it’s special to them

My entire experience of Auckland changed when I got a boat. It was the perfect antidote to a professional DJ lifestyle, where getting up at 5am to be on the water become immeasurably preferable to coming home at 5am from work. On trips out I began sticking my head underwater with such vigour that I somehow turned it into a whole new profession.

It didn’t happen straight away, of course. My 40-year-old, 14-foot beige fibreglass boat with a semi-reliable two-stroke engine, named Brown Thunder, only had so much range, and my real goal lay much farther offshore, tantalisingly out of reach. A place where tales of clear blue tropical water and huge fish swirled around a group of uninhabited islands, teasing me from the pages of marine magazines or the crusty lips of old salty sea-mates.

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Japan’s whaling town struggles to keep 400 years of tradition alive

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The resumption of killing whales for profit for the first time in over 30 years is offering little cause for celebration

You don’t have to look far to find evidence of Wada’s centuries-old connection to whaling. Visitors to the town on Japan’s Pacific coast are greeted by a replica skeleton of a blue whale before entering a museum devoted to the behemoths of the ocean.

At a local restaurant, diners eat deep-fried whale cutlet and buy cetacean-themed gifts at a neighbouring gift shop. At the edge of the water stands a wooden deck where harpooned whales are butchered before being sold to wholesalers and restaurants.

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Scientists watch giant ‘doomsday’ glacier in Antarctica with concern

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Cracks and fissures stoke fears of breakup that could lead to half-metre rise in global sea levels – or more

Twenty years ago, an area of ice thought to weigh almost 500bn tonnes dramatically broke off the Antarctic continent and shattered into thousands of icebergs into the Weddell Sea.

The 1,255-sq-mile (3,250-sq-km) Larsen B ice shelf was known to be melting fast but no one had predicted that it would take just one month for the 200-metre-thick behemoth to completely disintegrate.

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Coastal species are forming colonies on plastic trash in the ocean, study finds

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Termed “neopelagic communities”, these colonies are thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and going where the current flows

Masses of ocean plastic are providing artificial habitat for otherwise coastal species, according to a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal, Nature Communications.

The study’s authors observed floating water bottles, old toothbrushes and matted fishing nets. The possibility exists that species may be evolving to better adapt to life on plastic.

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‘We have to use a boat to commute’: coastal Ghana hit by climate crisis

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As the sea claims more of the west African shoreline, those left homeless by floods are losing hope that the government will act

Waves have taken the landscape John Afedzie knew so well. “The waters came closer in the last few months, but now they have destroyed parts of schools and homes. The waves have taken the whole of the village. One needs to use a boat to commute now because of the rising sea levels,” he says.

Afedzie lives in Keta, one of Ghana’s coastal towns, where a month ago high tide brought seawater flooding into 1,027 houses, according to the government, leaving him among about 3,000 people made homeless overnight.

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Whoops and grunts: ‘bizarre’ fish songs raise hopes for coral reef recovery

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Vibrant soundscape shows Indonesian reef devastated by blast fishing is returning to health

From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health.

Many of the noises had never been recorded before and the fish making these calls remain mysterious, despite the use of underwater speakers to try to “talk” to some.

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Nurdles: the worst toxic waste you’ve probably never heard of

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Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardous

When the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean in May, Sri Lanka was terrified that the vessel’s 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil would spill into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster for the country’s pristine coral reefs and fishing industry.

Classified by the UN as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, the biggest impact was not caused by the heavy fuel oil. Nor was it the hazardous chemicals on board, which included nitric acid, caustic soda and methanol. The most “significant” harm, according to the UN, came from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles.

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Nobel-winning stock market theory used to help save coral reefs

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Portfolio selection rules on evaluating risk used to pick 50 reefs as ‘arks’ best able to survive climate crisis and revive coral elsewhere

A Nobel prize-winning economic theory used by investors is showing early signs of helping save threatened coral reefs, scientists say.

Researchers at Australia’s University of Queensland used modern portfolio theory (MPT), a mathematical framework developed by the economist Harry Markowitz in the 1950s to help risk-averse investors maximise returns, to identify the 50 reefs or coral sanctuaries around the world that are most likely to survive the climate crisis and be able to repopulate other reefs, if other threats are absent.

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