As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

As elite distance swimmer Ben Lecomte approached the edge of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he started finding more and more of something unexpected — a lot of life.

image copyrightClaire Simonin‎ / Ar ViltansouA French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades.

A proposal to build two huge barriers — one that would connect Norway to Scotland, the other France to England — was described as a warning about the urgency of the climate crisis.LONDON — One dam would stretch some 300 miles from the coast of Scotland to Norway.

It’s underwater—and the consequences are unimaginable. Unless you are given to chronic anxiety or suffer from nihilistic despair, you probably haven’t spent much time contemplating the bottom of the ocean.

Astrangia. Credit: Stephen Cairns et al. An illustrated key to the genera and subgenera of the Recent azooxanthellate Scleractinia (Cnidaria, Anthozoa), with an attached glossary, ZooKeys (2012). DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.227.3612. Creative Commons Attribution 3.

At the end of last year, scientists discovered a small octopus city – dubbed Octlantis – a find that suggests members of the gloomy octopus species (Octopus tetricus) are perhaps not the isolated and solitary creatures we thought they were.

Mandy Barker, Ophelia medustica. Specimen collected from Glounthaune shoreline, Cove of Cork, Ireland, (Pram wheel), 2015. Series: Beyond Drifting: Imperfectly Known Animals, 2015 In 1816, John Vaughan Thompson was posted to Cork in Ireland as an army Surgeon.

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

Cephalopods loom large in our cultural mythos.

ON AN UNSEASONABLY WARM day in the middle of March, I traveled from New Hampshire to the moist, dim sanctuary of the New England Aquarium, hoping to touch an alternate reality. I came to meet Athena, the aquarium’s forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus.

Giant collection of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items called a ‘ticking time bomb’ as large items crumble into micro plastics 13.02 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 4 October 2016 13.

In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran.

It’s important to photograph the hermit crabs in their natural habitat.  I prefer to photograph them using a wide angle lens to achieve a unique perspective. Hermit crab in a glass bottle- Yomitan, Okinawa.

I think that for some people,” says Peter Girguis, a deep-sea microbial physiologist at Harvard University, “the ocean seems passé—that the days of Jacques Cousteau are behind us.” He begs to differ.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest spot in the ocean—and it’s home to some strange sights, sounds, and creatures. But there’s one thing down there that’s very familiar: a whole bunch of garbage.

There are all sorts of food scams perpetrated every day here in America. The whole farm-to-table trend, for example — a lot of that is probably just marketing bullshit, according to a recent excellent investigation published by the Tampa Bay Times.

According to a new study, humankind is now entering the “Age of Plastic”. The research investigates the evidence that we are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which humanity is the main geological force.

In the Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica, blue whales were nearly wiped out by industrial whaling from the 1920s to 1940s. But now, with whaling curtailed, the whales are surging back: their population growing by 7.3 percent per year.