ocean

Moments of Regret: Jetski Swept Into Rocks

by steve casimiro on April 2, 2012 · 0 comments

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Ouch. A nasty bit of heavy duty whitewater sweeps this rescue jetski into a wall of jagged lava rocks. Highly unpleasant, as the comments from the peanut gallery point out.

Court Protects Endangered Hawaiian Sea Turtles

by bob berwyn summit county voice on March 20, 2012 · 1 comment

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Endangered leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles around Hawaii may have a better chance of recovery after a federal court recently set strict limits on the longline swordfish fishery in the waters around the islands. “Our settlement ensures that sea turtles can swim more freely and safely in Hawaii’s waters,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at [...]

Dolphin “Stampede” Has the Ignorant Aflutter

by steve casimiro on March 5, 2012 · 6 comments

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In the last week, a video called “Dana Point Dolphin Stampede” has been generating tanker-loads of views and also tons of controversy. Shot from a whale-watching boat based here in my home town of Dana Point, California, it shows hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dolphins swimming around the boat. And perhaps it’s because of the poorly [...]

In Trying to Save Its Beaches, San Francisco Breaks the Law

by michael frank on January 6, 2012 · 2 comments

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San Francisco’s Ocean Beach was under attack by the Pacific Ocean, and in 1997, 1999, and 2010 the city responded to a number of El Niño storms by dumping concrete rubble to prevent erosion from damaging parking lots, a waste-water treatment plant, the San Francisco Zoo, and very expensive real estate. The problem is that [...]

What Victory at Sea Really Looks Like

by steve casimiro on January 5, 2012 · 2 comments

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If you ever paddle your surfboard out on a choppy windblown day, someone in the lineup inevitably will make a reference to “victory at sea” conditions. After a couple decades of hearing this little surfing cliche, I finally got curious enough to track down the 1954 film about World War II naval life and watched [...]

Feature Portfolio: Face to Face — Ocean Portraits

by steve casimiro on December 6, 2011 · 3 comments

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The ocean is the setting for many of mankind’s original adventures. Massive, mercurial, dangerous, and foreign to our sinking, uninsulated bodies, the seas are not so different from the moon or Mars. Unforgiving. Inhospitable. And still, despite advances in technology and knowledge, filled with wonder and mystery. Today we bring you a look at this [...]

Australia Proposes World’s Largest Marine Park

by steve casimiro on November 30, 2011 · 1 comment

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Believe it or not, George Bush can lay claim to having created the world’s largest marine reserve, the 140,000-square-mile Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northern Hawaiian Islands. But not for much longer: Australia wants to create a marine park off its northeast coast that’s more than double the Hawaiian reserve — a whopping 382,000 [...]

New Fishing Gear Saves Hundreds of Thousands of Seabirds

I know you don’t spend your night lying awake worrying about the deaths of seabirds via commercial fishing, but hundreds of thousands of them die every year as bycatch. A clever idea and new product that won the World Wildlife Fund’s design contest promises to cut bird mortality by nearly 90 percent, however. Developed by [...]

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Nearly Drowning — And What It Teaches

On the day I nearly drowned I distinctly remember the color of the sky (charcoal), the smell in the air (wood smoke), and the sound of a dog barking (mine, a shepherd-collie mix named Ranja, running up and down the shoreline). It was Halloween, 1980. What had been a long, glorious summer had faded into [...]

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Dog’s Affinity for Poop Leads to Understanding of Orca Deaths

Shit — it’s such a valuable tool. It’s no joke. Trackers use animal leavings all the time. In the realm of climate change, researchers have discovered in the Southern Ocean that the iron-rich feces of sperm whales fertilizes phytoplankton, which bloom, die, and fall to the ocean floor, taking carbon they’ve absorbed from the atmosphere [...]

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Wallpaper Wednesday: Queen Charlotte Island Wave

This week’s free wallpaper of a stunningly perfect wave on Queen Charlotte Island, B.C., is provided here in a full range of desktop sizes, for the iPhone and iPad, and for common Android sizes, too. This shot is by Chris Burkard, and you can purchase art-quality prints of it (with or without frames) through the [...]

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Cheat Sheet for Which Fish Are Okay to Eat

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollin writes that once you’ve learned about industrial food production, you either fundamentally change the way you eat or you make a deliberate decision to turn away. But once you know how bad it is, you can’t get it out of your head. The same is true of fish and [...]

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Arctic Sea Ice Heading for Summer Record Low

North Pole temperatures that have been 11 to 14 degrees F higher than normal, coupled with an early melting of sea ice and low snow cover in the Far North, have caused a swift retreat of sea ice this summer and could mean that the Arctic Ocean in 2011 will have the smallest sea ice [...]

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Some Critters Win, Some Lose As Polar Food Webs Undergo Radical Change

As sea ice rapidly melts in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica, the threat to creatures that use the ice as a feeding platform — polar bears and walruses in the Arctic, and Adélie penguins in the Antarctic — has been well publicized. But these iconic symbols of global warming are merely the pinnacle of [...]

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Shipwreck Explorer Seeking Body of Osama Bin Laden

Bill Warren has spent years searching for shipwrecks, usually in the hope of finding treasure. But his next mission is to locate and raise a much more contemporary object that is bound to place him at the center of controversy: the body of Osama bin Laden. Warren’s Arabian Sea expedition, which he hopes to begin [...]

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