The ocean is filled with microscopic creatures that thrive in the sunshine. These bacteria and plankton periodically clump up with detritus, like waste produced by fish, and then drift softly downward, transforming into what scientists call marine snow. In the inky depths of the ocean that the sun can’t reach, …
Read More »In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ Divers Face a Vanishing Way of Life
In the South Korean province of Jeju lives a group of women who may, at first, sound as if they’re mythical creatures. The haenyeo (“sea women”) dive and swim in the depths of the ocean without any breathing gear, harvesting seafood like conch, urchin and octopus, which they sell to …
Read More »When Two Sea Aliens Become One
Comb jellies, the delicate bells that pulse their iridescent bodies through the ocean, are some of the strangest creatures on earth. “They are the aliens of the sea,” said Leonid Moroz, a neuroscientist at the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience in St. Augustine, Fla. The aliens belong to the oldest …
Read More »A Storied Luxury Liner May Soon Find New Life on the Florida Seafloor
More than seven decades ago, the S.S. United States — a ship bigger than the Titanic — made its maiden voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, breaking the trans-Atlantic speed record. The ocean liner, which once transported heads of state and members of the Hollywood elite from New York City to …
Read More »They’ve Got a Plan to Fight Global Warming. It Could Alter the Oceans.
In a quiet patch of forest in Nova Scotia, a company is building a machine designed to help slow global warming by transforming Earth’s rivers and oceans into giant sponges that absorb carbon dioxide from the air. When switched on later this year, the machine will grind up limestone inside …
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