The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

It’s a gray summer evening on Galiano Island, a long strip of land about 1.5 kilometers across at its narrowest. Home to nearly 1,400 people, it is one of the 200-odd islands and islets in the Gulf ...

The planet was cold. Vast sheets of ice extended over the northern half of North America and parts of northeast Asia, forming treacherous frozen barrens. In between, death lurked in many forms.

One autumn afternoon in 1993, Amy Simon’s mother brought home a VHS tape of Free Willy, the boy-meets-whale tale that became a sleeper hit across North America that summer. Living in the tiny ...

In the grand scheme of things, Michael Moore regrets losing his sense of smell decades ago as the result of chemical exposure in veterinary school. It may have spared him some discomfort, though, on ...

Beside a spit of land jutting into a swampy enclosure, a female crocodile breaks the waterline, the bony ridges on her back jagged like an electrocardiogram. Her eyes track six sweat-soaked men ...

It’s World Ocean Day, a day when the ocean takes the podium and the world professes concern, but also love, for the planet’s life force. It’s a day of celebrations, and also cautionary tales. Marine ...

Douglas Wallace was on a research ship in the middle of Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence when he heard the news: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had met with Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, in ...

The northeast Pacific Ocean is home to an astonishing array of marine creatures—spiky urchins, multiarmed sea stars, soft sea slugs the color of lemons, and barnacles with their heads glued to rocks.

Among Rachel Carson’s many literary virtues is this: she was a keen observer of seaweed. In The Edge of the Sea, Carson’s 1955 ode to America’s Eastern Seaboard, she extolled the “smooth and satiny” ...

Gray clouds hang low over the Trondheim Fjord, a huge, convoluted indentation in the central Norwegian coast. A gusting wind blows the tops off the waves, tosses rain in my face, and fills Braute’s ...

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He ...