oceans

Worst-case planning never hurt anybody, and certainly not federal water projects that cost millions of dollars and could be easily undone by climate change and rising sea levels. A new policy now requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to plan for future climate change when designing plans for flood control or other projects.

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Human activity has widely affected our planet, reshaping surfaces, moving or extinguishing species, and warming the air and water. Now scientists say our reach has been extended even further -- warming oceans may even start to shift the Earth's axis of rotation.

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With over 70 percent of the world's natural fisheries taxed beyond the point of replenishment, the demand for farmed fish will only rise in the coming years. Unfortunately, the cramped conditions and shallow locations of most existing fish farms result in low yields and sickly, parasite-ridden fish.

That's where Cliff Goudey, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Offshore Aquaculture Engineering Center, comes in. He has attached robotic motors to a giant fish cage, allowing it to travel around the sea, rather than stay tethered in shallow water.

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About halfway through our cover story on the next generation of manned submarines, you'll find a provocative dispute between two legendary figures over the respective merits of manned and unmanned exploration of the ocean.

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Blue is the new black--or so Planet Green would have us believe, with their month-long Blue August television special focusing on all things aquatic. Planet Green will present water-themed documentaries and programs throughout August, with topics ranging from clean drinking water to the Great Barrier Reef.

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Over the last few years, knowledge about the effects of rising heat and CO2 levels in the atmosphere on coral reefs, those bizarre, multicultural underwater gardens, has proliferated. One of the newest reports, published this past March, predicts that if atmospheric carbon levels reach double what they are now – 750 parts per million – coral reefs will start to grow so slowly that they won’t keep themselves from dissolving.

Coral has already been dubbed a canary in a coalmine, due to its sensitivity to temperature and acidity, which make it a kind of first warning for the environmental changes wrought by rising global temperature and atmospheric carbon. We dive in to that canary-like sensitivity, and the complex life of a reef, in this new PopSci Comic.

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In his eight years as president, George W. Bush has done little to win the hearts of conservationists. Opponents criticize his backing of widespread drilling and mining projects, lax oversight of industrial pollution, and recent attempts to dismantle the 36-year-old Endangered Species Act.

But now, as he’s leaving office, the 43rd president is attempting to “blue” his legacy by granting national-monument status to a string of pristine islands, atolls and coral reefs in the center of the Pacific Ocean.

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Word spread quickly that Todd Jones, a young doctoral candidate in zoology, had something fantastic in the blue tanks of his lab at the University of British Columbia. The attraction was juvenile leatherback sea turtles, about the size of garbage-can lids. Why the attention?

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Alan Burns breaks the surface with a huge grin on his face, his baggy black wetsuit hanging off his body like walrus skin. It’s a scorching February afternoon, and we’re floating in the clear blue water of the Indian Ocean. To our left is the Australian resort island of Rottnest. To our right—just beyond Burns’s dazzling white yacht—is several thousand miles of open sea. And beneath us, the kelp forest where we had been diving moments before is swaying to the rhythm of the waves.

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Ninety billion tons, nearly one-tenth of Earth's biomass, is made up of microbes living beneath the sea floor, according to two studies appearing this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Nature.

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