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A million years ago, a longtime pattern of alternating glaciations and warm periods dramatically changed, when ice ages suddenly became longer and more intense. Scientists have long suspected that this was connected to the slowdown of a key Atlantic Ocean current system that today once again is slowing. A new study of sediments from the Atlantic bottom directly links this slowdown with a massive buildup of carbon dragged from the air into the abyss. With the system running at full speed, this carbon would have percolated back into the air fairly quickly, but during this period it just stagnated in the depths. This suggests that the carbon drawdown cooled the planet—the opposite of the greenhouse effect we are seeing now, as humans pump carbon into the atmosphere...

Six-year-old Reto Aisaka was jumping up and down on the windswept dock. For five months, he’d been counting the days until his dad, Toru, returned from a whale hunt. The boy was up at dawn to meet him. Shimonoseki, on the westernmost tip of Japan’s main island of Honshu, celebrated the return of its small whaling fleet late last month.

The mother ship, Nisshin Maru, carried the meat from 333 Antarctic minke whales. But it was a celebration that masked deep uncertainty about the future of Japan’s whaling industry.

The whales were taken under the guise of research – a designation that has kept Japan’s whaling industry alive despite a three-decade moratorium on commercial whaling.

These were the last Japanese whalers to return from the rich waters of Antarctica’s Southern ...

The world’s southernmost coral reefs have fallen victim to climate change. According to reports, the Lord Howe Island Marine Park is experiencing severe coral bleaching.

In some areas, about 90 percent of reefs have been damaged. Scientists said that this is the worst coral bleaching that the UNESCO World Heritage Site has experienced in recent memory.

Warm Summer Water Causes Widespread Coral Bleaching

Researchers from Newcastle University, James Cook University, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have surveyed the area for the past two weeks. They revealed that the bleaching occurred over the past summer, peaking in March, due to sustained heatwaves and warm ocean water temperature.

They also reported that the bleaching is at its most severe in shallow w...

In a remote spot in the South Atlantic, roughly 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the coast of West Africa, lies Ascension Island, one of the U.K.’s Overseas Territories. In January 2016, the British government announced plans made by Ascension’s elected governing body to protect the island’s biodiverse waters with a marine reserve spanning 230,000 square kilometers (90,000 square miles), an area almost as big as the U.K. itself. Fishing is prohibited in half this area and closely regulated in the other half.

On March 14, however, the U.K...

The shell of an adult hawksbill sea turtle consists of about a dozen overlapping scales colored with streaks of gold, brown, orange, and red. Hawksbills have long been hunted for their shells—the ancient Romans, for example, fashioned the scales into combs and rings.

Hawksbill scales are still being carved and polished into decorative and functional objects—tortoiseshell jewelry, trinkets, sunglasses. But the difference today is that killing hawksbills is forbidden. That’s been the case since 1977, when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the body that regulates cross-border trade in wildlife, assigned the hawksbill sea turtle its highest level of protection.

Meanwhile, the International Union for the Conservation of N...

Thanks to a trailblazing marine protection initiative in Turkey, the tide may finally be turning for the Mediterranean monk seal – one of the world’s most threatened marine mammals.

Mediterranean monk seals are exposed to a barrage of threats throughout their limited range, including habitat deterioration, pollution, accidental entanglement in fishing gear, disturbance at breeding sites and reduced availability of prey as a result of unsustainable and illegal fishing practices.

The global population of this endearing but endangered pinniped may be as low as 600 individuals, and the total number of adults is estimated at no more than 450. The Aegean Sea harbours the largest subpopulation, and around 100 of these seals are found in Turkish waters.

Gökova Bay Special Environmental...

A dead whale that washed up in the Philippines had 40kg (88lbs) of plastic bags inside its stomach, researchers have said. Workers at D’Bone Collector Museum recovered the Cuvier’s beaked whale east of Davao City earlier in March. In a Facebook post, the museum said the animal was filled with “the most plastic we have ever seen in a whale”.

There were 16 rice sacks in its stomach, as well as “multiple shopping bags”.

The museum will post a full list of the items found in the whale over the next few days.

“I was not prepared for the amount of plastic,” the museum’s founder and president, Darrell Blatchley, told broadcaster CNN. “It was so big, the plastic was beginning calcification.”

The use of throwaway plastic is a particular problem in some South East Asian countries, inclu...

More than half of the UK’s global waters are set to be within Marine Protected Areas, putting the UK at the forefront of calls to protect 30 per cent of the world’s ocean by 2030.

The UK Government has backed plans by Ascension Island to designate over 150,000 square miles of its waters as a fully protected ‘no-take’ Marine Protected Area (MPA) – closing the off-shore area to any fishing activity and safeguarding important marine habitats for future generations.

When protected, the new no-take zone around Ascension Island would bring the total percentage of MPAs in the UK’s territorial waters, Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies to over 50%...

The first coral reef in Italy has been identified, according to researchers. The underwater ecosystem extends for at least two and a half kilometres on the Adriatic coast near Monopoli, in Puglia. It is the first mesophotic coral reef – a term applied to ecosystems with low levels of light – to be found in the Mediterranean.

These types of reef “are found at depths ranging from 30–40 metres … up to 200 metres”, the researchers write in the study published in Nature.

For this reason, the colours of the coral reef in Puglia are more subtle than the better-known varieties in the Pacific.

“The famous Australian or Maldivian coral reefs rise almost to the surface of the water, making the most of the sunlight that is the real fuel of these ecosystems,” said Prof Giuseppe ...

For more than a month, oil has been pouring out of a large ship that ran aground in the Solomon Islands next to a fragile UNESCO World Heritage site, and there’s growing outrage that the companies responsible have not taken action to stop the environmental destruction. 

The Hong Kong-flagged cargo ship, called the Solomon Trader, got stuck when it was attempting to load bauxite during a cyclone on Feb. 5, Radio New Zealand reported. The island’s reef tore a gash in the side of the ship, endangering what UNESCO describes as the “largest raised coral atoll in the world.” 

Since then, it has dispersed some 80 tons of heavy fuel oil into the sea and onto the shoreline, Australian authorities say, and more than 650 tons are still on the ship. 

“There is a high risk the remaining...