Every day, trillions of dollars, oil and gas and 99% of the world’s web traffic move through undersea pipelines under no state’s protection. With superpowers and corporations now vying for control, sh...

Plastic pollution could disrupt the bioluminescent light produced by deep-sea organisms, researchers warn in a letter in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Plastics. When deep-sea organisms ingest…

Scientists say rapid warming has also led to accelerated sea level rise over the past decade

The injection of thermal energy comes amid an increasing rise in sea levels and continuing acidification

Coverage levels fall a million square kilometres short of the long-term average, with global heating likely driving losses

Plastic pollution could disrupt the bioluminescent light produced by deep-sea organisms, researchers warn in a letter in the journal Cambridge Prisms: Plastics. When deep-sea organisms ingest plastics, it could disrupt the chemical pathways that create bioluminescence and damage the tissues in their bodies, impairing their ability to find food and a mate, the authors said. In the deep sea, up to 80% of organisms with complex cells are believed to be bioluminescent, the only source of light in the darkest parts of the ocean. The light these organisms create is essential for their survival and reproduction, the letter notes. Disruption of their bioluminescence could negatively impact food webs and ecosystem functions in the deep sea, the largest and least-explored biome on Earth, the letter says. In an email to Mongabay, co-author Renjith VishnuRadhan of Amity University in India offered the example of an anglerfish. “It is widely recognizable from documentaries and films such as Finding Nemo,” he said. “Female deep-sea anglerfish have a modified dorsal spine ending in a luminous lure called the esca. Light produced by symbiotic bacteria helps attract prey and may also assist with recognition or communication in darkness.” It’s well-established that bacterial bioluminescence can be affected...

Zero Waste Asia is by the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) Asia Pacific.

The world demanded - and UNEP Resolution 5/14 mandated - a global instrument to end plastic pollution, including measures along the full life cycle of plastics. Can a treaty that avoids controls on plastic production, and instead focuses only on recycling and burning plastics, deliver? Is a recycling-first approach serious and effective, or deceptive framing

A new study led by the University of Alicante (UA) and the Mediterranean Center for Environmental Studies (CEAM) analyzes the barriers separating scientific knowledge from environmental policy and its...

Seven of nine Planetary Boundaries breach safe limits at record levels, a new report warns, as ocean heat and extreme weather intensify.

Nearly all of the pollution — 96 percent — comes from rivers in developing countries. High plastic use, mismanagement of plastic waste, strong rainfall and high solar radiation are major factors.

“We thought this was the worst-case scenario, as a fledgling of that size couldn’t survive eating any more. We were wrong.” <span class="fr-mk" style="display: none;">&nbsp;</span> “From 2023 to 2026, the record for the most plastic ingested by these birds has been broken year after year. The plastic crisis is only getting worse, but we’re acting nowhere near fast enough to try and tackle it.” A diet of plastic Bond and his colleagues at the Adrift Lab have been monitoring the amount of plastic being ingested by sable shearwaters nesting on Lord Howe Island, off the eastern coast of Australia, since 2007. By bringing together a team of ecologists, ecotoxologists, and statisticians, amongst others, they have been able to collect the longest-running time series of plastic ingestion in any seabird species anywhere in the world. This latest study collates 16 years’ worth of that data to show how the trend in plastic ingestion is occurring over time. And it’s not looking good. While for the first 10 years the mass and number of pieces of plastic found in the bellies of shearwater chicks fluctuated, in recent years there has been a dramatic uptick. This culminated in 2025 when a chick was...

Exclusive: Plastic surfaces form hotspots for interaction between plastics, microbes and agrochemicals

An extensive series of studies documents myriad harmful effects.

Rivers are key conduits in the global microplastic cycle, but how much they export to ` ocean and what controls this export remain unresolved. Here, we present a global daily dataset of riverine micro...

The critical and highly anticipated yearly assessment will be carried forward through a partnership with CIRES/CU Boulder and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

SOUTH KONAWE, Indonesia — A marine protected area in Indonesia’s Southeast Sulawesi province is home to a critically depleted population of humphead wrasse. The species presence helped the area gain its protected status, but mining permits overlap parts of the conservation zone and line its coast. A 2024 government survey, published the following year, found just 22 humphead wrasse (Cheilinus undulatus) across 10 sampling stations — an average density of 1.17 fish per hectare — in the Moramo Bay local marine protected area (LMPA) in Southeast Sulawesi’s South Konawe district. It recorded no fish at three sites where the species was still observed in 2018. Officials and researchers say the bay’s coral reefs face mounting pressure from sedimentation, pollution, vessel activity and other threats, but no study has established a direct link between mining and the wrasse’s decline. “In a polluted area … this fish will definitely disappear,” Sasanti Retno Suharti, a coral reef fish ecology researcher who has been researching humphead wrasse since 2006, told Mongabay Indonesia in August. “It will move far away into deeper waters.” “If it is no longer there, eventually the crown-of-thorns starfish will take over and feed on the corals,” she added. “The ecosystem...

Fueled by climate change and a strengthening El Niño, record-setting marine heat waves are gripping oceans worldwide and playing havoc with sea life. Mounting evidence from recent events suggests the ...

Satellite measurements of chlorophyll at the sea surface signal shifts in the ocean’s nutrient supplies in mid-2026.

Rising sea temperatures mean reefs don’t have enough time to bounce back between intense heat waves, a new report warns.