Between Tides is my personal column exclusively for paid subscribers. Think of it as an opinion column rather than one of my more rigorous science or policy pieces. It’s a chance for me to write down what I’m thinking or feeling, and hopefully, by the end of each one, there’ll be something useful for you, too.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that the main Hawaiian Islands population of false killer whales has been declining by about 3.5 per cent a year since 2013. On 16 September, it reported that two calves first photographed in February had both been seen again in August.

I spend most weeks looking at what is going wrong in the ocean. This week, enough of the evidence pointed the other way that I decided to give the whole Brief to good news.

Deep Dives

Two rare false killer whale calves were seen again in August

There are only about 140 false killer whales in the endangered population that lives around the main Hawaiian Islands. NOAA says just ten newborn calves have been documented in that population since 1999.

Staff from the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary photographed two newborn calves off Maui in February. One was swimming beside a female known as HIPc0363, which researchers at Cascadia Research Collective have followed since she was first seen as a juvenile in 2009. This is the first year they have recorded her with a calf, and they believe it is her first.

In August, staff from Captain Zodiac saw both calves again and contacted Cascadia. By then they were around eight months old and swimming strongly. NOAA says the first six months are an especially vulnerable period for young false killer whales.

Females generally reach reproductive age between eight and eleven years old, pregnancies last about 14 months, calves can nurse for up to two years and the available data suggest females usually give birth only once every seven to nine years. That can mean only four to seven calves across a female’s lifetime.

Read the NOAA Fisheries update

An oyster reef off South Tyneside survived its first North Sea winter

In October 2025, conservationists created a one-hectare native oyster restoration site off Whitburn, South Tyneside. Twenty specially designed reef cubes were placed on the seabed with 60,000 juvenile oysters and 100 tonnes of scallop shell, while 4,000 adult oysters were attached to the cubes. The structures give oysters hard surfaces to attach to and create shelter for other animals.

Nine months is too early to know whether a reef has been successfully restored, but it was enough time to see whether the oysters and the structures had made it through their first winter.

On 10 September, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) reported the results of surveys by seven volunteer divers carried out in July, and all 20 cubes were still in place. ZSL said 99 per cent of the adult oysters attached to them were alive and healthy, juvenile oysters had survived the winter, and divers recorded fish, crabs, sea urchins, shrimps and squat lobsters using the reef.

Native oyster reefs disappeared from this part of the North East more than a century ago, and across the UK, ZSL says native oyster numbers have fallen by more than 95 per cent since the 1800s following habitat loss, over-harvesting, pollution and disease.

A study published in Ecosphere on 15 September gives us a much longer view. Researchers studied restored oyster reefs at Harris Creek in Chesapeake Bay six to ten years after restoration. The project covers about 1.4 square kilometres, and the researchers combined underwater video with high-resolution sonar to study both the reefs and the animals using them. The authors note that sonar can miss animals hidden within the reef or remaining still during a recording.

The habitat surveys found that restored reefs still had high oyster cover and more complicated three-dimensional structure years after restoration. In the smaller sonar comparison between restored and harvested reefs, the restored sites supported larger animals overall. Reefs restored using stone had the highest numbers of animals longer than 30 centimetres, while harvested reefs had more animals overall and more small schooling fish.

Read the South Tyneside update from ZSL

Pacific bluefin’s 2022 spawning stock was estimated at nearly twelve times its 2010 low

The stock assessment used in the International Scientific Committee’s latest Pacific bluefin status summary covers the period from 1983 to 2022. These are modelled estimates rather than counts of individual tuna.

The model put spawning stock biomass, the estimated weight of adult tuna capable of reproducing, at about 12,300 tonnes in 2010. By 2022, it was about 144,000 tonnes. That is nearly twelve times higher. Fishing pressure also fell substantially over the same period, particularly on younger tuna.

The international rebuilding plan had two stages. The second target was to get the spawning stock above 20 per cent of the level scientists estimate would exist without fishing. Pacific bluefin passed that target in 2021, and the 2022 estimate put it at around 23 per cent.

There’s also been a new management decision this month. At its annual meeting from 31 August to 4 September, the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission adopted new eastern Pacific catch measures for 2027 and 2028, along with an interim management procedure for deciding how future catches should change as the stock changes.

Read the latest Pacific bluefin status assessment

Quick Hits

Ships followed mandatory whale slowdowns 96 per cent of the time

Canada uses a mixture of mandatory and voluntary vessel measures for North Atlantic right whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The study here looked at the mandatory dynamic shipping zones. When a right whale is detected and a navigational warning is issued, vessels longer than 13 metres must stay at or below 10 knots in the affected zone.

A Marine Policy paper published online on 3 July 2026 analysed 11,509 journeys made by cargo ships, tankers and cruise ships across 49 slowdown periods between 2020 and 2023. Of the 3,944 transits through zones while a mandatory 10-knot restriction was active, 96 per cent were at or below the limit.

When vessels did go faster, the average speed was 10.54 knots, and none of the cruise ships in the study exceeded the limit during an active slowdown. The researchers also looked at speeds in neighbouring areas and found only small changes. The study measured ship behaviour rather than whale deaths, so it cannot tell us how many collisions the restrictions prevented.

Maryland gave common terns a floating place to nest

By 2020, fewer than 30 common tern nests remained in Maryland’s Coastal Bays. Conservation groups responded by putting a floating wooden nesting platform into the water to replace some of the sandy island habitat the birds had lost.

In its first breeding season, the raft held 23 nests and produced 22 chicks. During the 2026 season, biologists counted 376 nests there and another 84 on nearby Reedy Island, where natural habitat has also been restored.

Some birds that hatched on the raft are now nesting on Reedy Island.

New Zealand has extended limits on new Hector’s dolphin tourism permits

New Zealand’s Department of Conservation (DOC) announced on 11 September that it would place another ten-year moratorium on new marine mammal tourism permits around Banks Peninsula. Existing permits held by six operators in Akaroa and Lyttelton are unaffected, while the area covered by the moratorium has been expanded beyond Akaroa Harbour to waters around much more of the peninsula.

Banks Peninsula is an important stronghold for Hector’s dolphins, one of the world’s smallest dolphin species. DOC says around 15,000 remain and that research has found changes in behaviour and habitat use following repeated vessel interactions. The department says the wider area is intended to leave dolphins places where they can feed and socialise with fewer tourism and recreation vessels around them.

Scientists have described nine new sponge species in Alaska

On 10 September, NOAA Fisheries announced that scientists had described nine deep-sea sponge species from the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands that were previously unknown to science. The specimens came from annual bottom-trawl surveys dating back to 2012. There is an awkward bit to that: NOAA’s own research in Alaska has found that bottom trawling can remove and damage large sponges, with lower sponge densities still detectable years later.

The samples themselves have produced a lot of new information. One species was different enough for scientists to create a new genus, the category above species, for it. Another belongs to a group previously known only from tropical waters. The discoveries take the number of known sponge species in Alaska to 232, while researchers think many more remain unidentified in rocky deep water that normal bottom-trawl surveys cannot reach.

The genetic information from the new species has also been added to public databases used for environmental DNA, or eDNA, work, giving researchers more reference material when they analyse traces of DNA collected from seawater.

Read more from NOAA Fisheries

Hard Truth From The Sea

The bad news in the ocean can pile up so quickly that it starts to feel like the only direction of travel, and I think that’s why weeks like this matter.

Two rare whale calves are still swimming beside their mothers. Tuna numbers have climbed, ships are slowing down, terns are returning and oysters have survived a North Sea winter.

Each one shows us something that worked, now the challenge is to build on it.

If you fancy trying a paid subscription, it opens up the full archive, every investigation and back issue. If not, that’s honestly fine. I’m glad you turn up each week for this.

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See you next week.

Luke

A few months ago I put a date in my calendar where I wrote 'Iceland Ends Whaling'. It was my way of trying to manifest something (I've read a lot about the power of manifesting and thought I'd give it a crack).

I was in Reykjavik in June 2023 when Iceland suspended the hunt due to breaches of animal welfare law, and I shook fisheries minister Svandís Svavarsdóttir’s hand, thinking something had genuinely changed. But a month later the suspension was lifted, and the ships went back out and killed 25 whales (including an unborn calf) before the season ended.

On Sunday, ships Hvalur 8 and Hvalur 9 returned to Reykjavik harbour, ending Iceland’s 2026 fin whaling season, where 93 fin whales were killed in 94 days. The guns, harpoons and explosives have been taken off the ships, packed away for the winter, as they are each year, ready to be unpacked at the start of the next whaling season.

However, that season might not come, as the Icelandic government is preparing new whaling legislation, due to be introduced in February 2027, and the minister responsible has said it will contain a provision to ban whaling.

Hvalur still has a licence that would otherwise allow the hunt to continue through 2029, and Kristján Loftsson, comic book villain and owner of Hvalur, Iceland's only fin whaling company, has made it very clear that he does not intend to quietly accept a ban.

There is now a very real possibility, though, that among the 93 killed this summer was the last fin whale Iceland will ever kill commercially. For years I have watched people in Iceland fight this hunt. Scientists documenting what happens to whales after they are struck, Icelanders protesting, campaigners standing above the whaling station photographing bodies and brave activists climbing the masts.

I have also watched those same ships leave harbour time and time again, which is why I'm not quite ready to call this the end.

The date I chose in the calendar was Friday October the 23rd, so my manifestations aren't going to work this time, I don't think. But, I look forward to seeing what unfolds in the new year, and I hope that we finally get there.

No one was holding up a banner at the harbour this week saying WHALING IS OVER. After years of fighting for the end of whaling in Iceland, it might just be that a ship came quietly into the harbour, the engine was switched off, the harpoons were carried ashore, and that was that.

I really hope that is what's just happened.

It’s not the news you were hoping for, if you’re a fan of all things ocean. Cooling the planet would obviously still be an incredibly good thing, of course, and every tiny fraction of a degree we avoid truly does matter. It’s just that the ocean doesn’t respond in the way we would hope it might. Sea level can keep rising, reefs can be badly damaged along the way, and ocean conditions can keep changing long after global temperatures have started falling back down.

That’s what I’ve been coming to terms with this week, after reading through a new UN report.

I think we’ve sometimes talked about 1.5°C as like it’s a big old on/off switch. Stay below it and we’re okay, go above it and we’re buggered.

The reality is much messier than that, and that’s what this episode gets into.

I record Voice for the Blue because ocean stories deserve to be heard. I write Ocean Rising so those stories reach you each week. This is only possible thanks to a wonderfully supportive group of paying subscribers. If you find value here, please do consider joining them.

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I will be back in your ears soon.

- Luke

Wednesday 9 September was a long day. Just another day of ocean conservationing, really.

My first stop was Westminster, where Valentina Crast and the Sea Shepherd Global team were presenting their latest report on the grindadráp, the pilot whale hunts in the Faroe Islands, to MPs. My frustration came from knowing that this fight still has a very long way to go, despite all the evidence showing why the hunts should end. I hope to return to the Faroes later this year and meet some of the people who want change.

I then headed across London to Kanaloa House in Soho for the Ocean Photographer of the Year event, held by Oceanographic and Blancpain.

I walked around the photographs, lost in complete awe and wonder at what the ocean holds, until I reached Karsten Michels’ image of a mutilated pilot whale in the Faroe Islands. I was excited about the event because my day to day can be tough. I’m either campaigning to stop commercial whaling and captivity, or writing about the failing systems that are affecting the ocean.

Having that respite interrupted by an image of what I’d been talking to people about a few hours earlier was jarring, but I was also glad to see it. The ocean is, of course, filled with beauty, but it’s also full of horror, and hiding that from the people in the room wouldn’t tell its full story.

The overall prize went to Julien Anton for a photograph of a male seahorse with two tiny juveniles beside him in the waters of Mo’orea. Jenny Stock received the Female Fifty Fathoms Award, whose recipient is nominated by fellow photographers rather than entering herself.

Late that same evening, Iceland’s government published its parliamentary programme. A permanent whaling ban was in it, although not in the form some of the first headlines suggested.

That’s the lead this week. After that, two pieces of science that resurfaced in the news over the past few days: one modelling what thousands of offshore wind turbines could do to the North Sea, and another asking which organisms were actually carrying carbon down through the ocean. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.

Deep Dives

Iceland has scheduled a review of its whaling law. A permanent ban is one of the options.

Iceland’s government has placed a full review of the country’s 1949 Whaling Act on its programme for February 2027. The official parliamentary programme says the bill will draw on a working group’s report about how whaling is governed and regulated.

It says particular consideration will be given to the group’s views on a permanent ban, and the review must consider questions under Iceland’s constitution involving freedom to work and property rights.

Those questions could affect what any ban covered, when it began, and what happened to licences already granted. The programme doesn’t say what conclusion the government has reached.

No bill has been published, and there is nothing yet showing what would be prohibited, when any ban might take effect or how the government would deal with licences already in place.

While the government prepared that review, the 2026 hunting season continued. Iceland’s Marine and Freshwater Research Institute advised catch limits that would allow up to 150 fin whales to be killed across two management areas. Around 80 fin whales (classified as Vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List) have been killed so far this season.

The fin-whale hunt is carried out by Hvalur hf, the company run by Kristján Loftsson. In December 2024, Iceland’s outgoing government granted separate licences for fin-whale and minke-whale hunting. Hvalur received the fin-whale licence; a separate minke-whale licence went to Tjaldtangi ehf.

The government described the licences as covering a total of five years and being extended annually. It didn’t explain whether each annual extension required a new decision or happened automatically. The parliamentary programme also doesn’t say whether a future prohibition would apply to those licences.

A permanent ban has now entered Iceland’s formal parliamentary work. Whether the government will include one in its bill, and what it could mean for the current licences, remain unanswered.

Thousands of offshore wind turbines could change more than the wind above the North Sea.

Offshore wind is central to Europe’s attempt to cut the emissions warming the ocean. The turbines also stand in the sea, where their foundations and wakes can change the water around them.

Mongabay returned to that question this week, bringing two modelling studies from earlier this year back into the news.

A turbine affects the sea in two main ways. Its blades remove energy from the wind, reducing the force that the wind applies to the water below. Its foundation stands in the current like a post in a river, slowing the flow and creating turbulence. Both effects leave wakes that can travel beyond the turbine itself.

Nils Christiansen, Ute Daewel and Corinna Schrum published a study in Communications Earth & Environment on 13 January. They ran a detailed North Sea model using weather and ocean conditions from 2008 to 2017. One set of simulations represented wind farms operating or being built in 2023. Another represented a much larger possible layout in 2050. Everything that follows is model output, not a measurement of what the North Sea is doing now.

In the 2023 scenario, wind wakes reduced average surface-current speeds by around 10 per cent. Drag from turbine foundations had about half that effect. Together, the two kinds of wake produced reductions of 20 per cent or more in some areas containing several groups of turbines.

Temperature moved in both directions. Across the German Bight, reduced wind produced average summer surface warming of up to 0.05°C. Close to some wind farms, turbulence around the foundations pulled colder water upwards and produced local surface cooling of 0.15°C or more.

The 2050 scenario produced changes across a wider area. Average surface-current speeds fell by 5 to 15 per cent across much of the central and southern North Sea. The reduction exceeded 20 per cent in the German Bight, where the researchers said the combination of many turbines and naturally slow currents probably increased the effect.

Across most of the modelled area, the average sea-surface temperature rose by roughly 0.05 to 0.15°C. A few wind-farm areas in the German Bight cooled instead. The annual warming of around 0.1°C remained within the North Sea’s natural year-to-year variation of about 1°C. The authors also noted that it was roughly one tenth of the warming projected for the region from climate change this century.

A second modelling study, led by Jiayue Chen and published in the same journal on 14 March, followed the sediment. It found that wind farms could change the amount and direction of sediment moving through some places by up to 30 per cent. In the model, as much as 1.5 million tonnes of mud and 70,000 tonnes of organic carbon were redistributed each year. It also suggested that wind farms retained about 1.5 per cent of the sediment carried into the North Sea by rivers, changing where mud and carbon settled and how the open sea connected to coastal areas such as the Wadden Sea.

The results depended on water depth, currents, turbine numbers, location and the way the model represented some complicated processes. The researchers’ 3,000-metre result is therefore a comparison from one set of simulations, not a universal safe distance.

In those simulations, however, the mixing effects barely accumulated where the researchers assumed about 3,000 metres between turbines. At 1,000 metres or less, the model produced much stronger areas of turbulence. Turbines installed in the North Sea by 2023 were, on average, about 900 to 1,300 metres apart.

What reached a trap 1,000 metres below the South China Sea.

Cyanobacteria are tiny, single-celled organisms that use sunlight to make energy and take in carbon. For decades, many ocean models have treated them as poor at carrying that carbon into deep water. The usual reasoning is simple: large cells sink and small ones don’t.

The biological carbon pump is the name scientists give to the different ways carbon moves from sunlit surface water into the deep ocean. Once it gets deep enough, some of it can remain away from the atmosphere for centuries. Many models give larger phytoplankton, including diatoms, the leading role in that journey.

A paper published in AGU Advances on 30 August challenges that assumption. Eos highlighted it on 10 September, which is why an older set of samples entered the news this week.

The researchers studied one station in the northern South China Sea. A sediment trap moored at about 1,000 metres collected sinking material between June 2009 and May 2010. The team compared it with information about surface communities gathered during 19 research cruises between 2004 and 2015. This wasn’t a snapshot of the ocean today.

Different groups of phytoplankton leave different carbon signatures in the amino acids they produce. The researchers measured those signatures in the material caught by the trap and used a statistical model to estimate which groups had supplied the carbon.

The community at the surface changed with the seasons. Cyanobacteria dominated when biological production was lower, while larger microalgae became dominant when production increased. The balance was much more stable in the material collected at 1,000 metres. Cyanobacteria supplied most of the sinking carbon throughout the year, including when larger microalgae dominated closer to the surface.

The paper suggests two reasons. Carbon from larger microalgae was broken down more heavily as it passed through the ocean’s twilight zone, the dim layer between about 100 and 1,000 metres. Cyanobacteria could become caught inside larger clumps of material containing mineral particles. Those clumps helped carry the carbon down and may have protected some of it from being consumed by microbes. The researchers inferred that mechanism from their data; they didn’t watch individual cells make the journey.

This may help explain why colder parts of the ocean dominated by large phytoplankton don’t always store carbon more efficiently than warm, nutrient-poor waters filled with cyanobacteria. It doesn’t prove that the same process operates everywhere.

This was one year of trap material from one station in one basin, and the method hasn’t yet produced the same result in the North Atlantic or Southern Ocean, and the authors say its wider importance still needs to be tested.

At that northern South China Sea station, cyanobacteria supplied an estimated 67 per cent, plus or minus 2 per cent, of the sinking organic carbon collected at 1,000 metres.

Quick Hits

On 10 September, the Financial Times reported that provisional NOAA data had recorded 100 consecutive days on which the average global sea-surface temperature set a record for that date, beginning on 2 June. The report didn’t state the geographical bounds or baseline used for that calculation, so the figure should be treated as provisional. A developing El Niño is adding to the heat, while human-caused climate change remains the long-term driver. These global averages are different from marine heatwaves, which measure unusual warmth in particular places. Copernicus Marine Service reported that about 82 per cent of the global ocean had experienced marine heatwave conditions of varying strength by the end of June.

ClientEarth and Legambiente, supported by Blue Marine Foundation, have launched legal action seeking stronger protection for two Italian marine sites where they say bottom trawling continues. One lies in Tuscan waters inside the Pelagos Sanctuary. The other, Litorale di Gallipoli – Isola di Sant’Andrea, lies off Apulia and contains seagrass meadows and reef habitat. The organisations say authorities have failed to map habitats properly, assess the risks from bottom trawling and take measures to prevent damage. I haven’t seen the underlying legal filing, so those remain the organisations’ description of the case. Disclosure: I hold a retainer with Blue Marine Foundation.

Hard Truth From The Sea

So what is the thread that tirs all these stories together this week? The first description was never enough. The photography exhibition was full of beauty, and it also held an image of a mutilated pilot whale. Iceland’s programme contains a review, with a permanent ban as only one option. Offshore wind cuts emissions, while its turbines can change currents, temperature and sediment. A global heat record doesn’t describe every stretch of ocean, and the groups bringing the Italian case say bottom trawling continues inside two protected sites.

If you fancy trying a paid subscription, it opens up the full archive, every investigation and back issue. If not, that’s honestly fine. I’m glad you turn up each week for this.

Subscribe now

See you next week.

Luke

Somewhere south of the Kerguelen Islands, about as far from anywhere as you can get, elephant seals have been quietly doing oceanography for us.

I love stories like this, because an animal can go looking for dinner and, without knowing anything about climate models or how ocean water moves, end up telling us how heat and food move around one of the least visited parts of the planet.

Elsewhere this week, a study found that fish stocks can send a warning sign more than a decade before they collapse, NOAA published a list of proposed changes to American fishing rules that seems to touch almost every place where commercial fishing meets wildlife protection, the Bay of Biscay dolphin closure is back for another winter with a new design, scientists treated bleaching corals with bacteria during a real heatwave, and Jersey has closed more than a fifth of its waters to dredging and bottom trawling.

Deep Dives

Elephant seals have been showing us what happens beneath the Southern Ocean

Southern elephant seals are enormous, a big male can weigh as much as a small car, and they spend most of the year at sea, diving hundreds of metres down after squid and fish in places where sending a research ship regularly would be difficult, expensive and, for long stretches of the year, fairly miserable.

For years, scientists have been fitting some of them with sensors that record how warm and salty the water is as they dive, and a team of researchers has now gone through 133,598 of those dives, made between 2014 and 2020 in the stretch of the Southern Ocean south of Kerguelen, roughly halfway between South Africa and Australia.

The ocean is full of small patches where warmer and colder water meet and start swirling around each other, sometimes across an area one to twenty kilometres wide, and these movements don’t only push water sideways, they also push it up and down, carrying heat and nutrients between the surface and deeper water.

Scientists already knew quite a lot about what happens near the surface because satellites and ships can observe it more easily, but they knew much less about what was happening hundreds of metres down. Especially in winter, when the Southern Ocean is dark, rough and largely empty of research ships.

The seal data changed that, because the same movements were still showing up at least 500 metres below the surface, they were actually stronger down there than in the upper layer of the ocean, and their strength changed during the year too, peaking in the southern spring and falling to its lowest point in autumn.

That matters because the Southern Ocean absorbs huge amounts of heat and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helps move nutrients around the world’s oceans, so if more water is moving up and down far below the surface than scientists had realised, they may need to rethink some of their estimates of how heat and nutrients are being moved around.

There’s a limit to what 133,598 seal dives can tell us, because the seals went where elephant seals wanted to go, mainly where they expected to find food, rather than where a scientist designing the perfect experiment might have sent them, and this is still only one part of a very large ocean.

It’s still 133,598 measurements from a place where getting measurements is difficult, collected by animals that were mostly interested in finding squid.

Fish stocks may warn us twelve years before they collapse

Twelve years is the number that stuck out from a study published in Science Advances this week, the average gap between a fish population showing a particular warning sign and that same population later collapsing.

Mathieu Pélissié, Vincent Devictor and Vasilis Dakos at the University of Montpellier, working with Olaf Jensen in the United States, looked at 315 fish stocks from around the world with records stretching back to 1950, and instead of simply asking how many fish were left, they looked at how well each population was producing new fish.

A stock, in this context, just means one population of one species living in one area, so North Sea cod would be one stock, and the researchers had to estimate how well those populations were reproducing using fishing records and scientific surveys.

More than a quarter of the 315 stocks went through a sudden change at some point; more than half of those changes were declines, and stocks that suffered one of those sudden drops were twice as likely to collapse later, with the decline appearing, on average, about 12 years before the collapse.

That’s a long gap, particularly because the researchers also found that these declines were more common in parts of the ocean that had warmed fastest. When they compared warming with other possible explanations, including the type of fish and how heavily it was being caught, warming was the factor most closely linked to the drops.

The study doesn’t give every fishery a 12 year countdown, because it looked at 315 stocks with unusually long records and the warning sign itself has to be estimated from fishing and survey data, rather than something scientists can simply measure by putting an instrument in the water.

Boats can still be bringing in plenty of fish even when the population has already started producing fewer young fish, which means the warning can arrive while everything still looks normal.

NOAA is changing a lot more than one fishing rule

On 2 September, Eugenio Piñeiro Soler, who leads NOAA Fisheries, published a list of the rules and policies his agency intends to change, and what caught my attention wasn’t one single item so much as how many different parts of fisheries management appear once you keep reading.

The first major section says NOAA wants to move faster on removing commercial fishing bans from parts of four huge protected areas in the Pacific, including Papahānaumokuākea near Hawaii and the Mariana Trench, then there’s a rewrite of the speed rules designed to stop ships hitting North Atlantic right whales, a decision not to force lobster boats to switch to fishing gear without fixed vertical ropes, an outside review of the computer models used when deciding how to reduce whale entanglements, and another review of the models used to estimate how often humpback whales are at risk of getting caught in crab fishing gear on the west coast.

Keep reading and you reach rules protecting fish habitat, devices fitted to shrimp nets so turtles can escape, the way endangered species decisions are made, and the checks used on seafood imported into the United States.

That’s a lot of different rules moving at once, and they affect where fishing can happen, how scientists work out the danger to wildlife, what evidence regulators rely on and when those regulators decide fishing needs to be restricted.

The programme is Piñeiro Soler’s plan for carrying out President Trump’s order on Restoring American Seafood Competitiveness, and NOAA hasn’t invented the monument changes on its own, because Trump signed a proclamation on 11 June opening specified parts of the Pacific monuments to commercial fishing, while the Atlantic went first earlier this year, when a February proclamation changed the rules for Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off New England and NOAA published the final change on 6 April.

Piñeiro Soler and the administration argue that some fishing businesses are dealing with rules that cost them money without delivering enough benefit, and that better science and newer technology can protect marine life without closing as much ocean to fishing. While the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council had already recommended reopening some areas to commercial fishing before the June proclamation, following around 70 written and spoken public comments.

I can see the argument, particularly if a rule is genuinely outdated or based on science that has since improved, although the stakes feel rather different when you apply that logic to an animal such as the North Atlantic right whale.

The latest population estimate is 384 animals, and getting tangled in fishing gear and being hit by ships remain the two major human caused threats to the species. Decisions about ship speeds, fishing ropes and the computer models used to judge risk are being made while there are still fewer than 400 of these whales alive.

Quick Hits

The Bay of Biscay dolphin closure is back, with a twist

Five EU countries want the winter fishing closure in the Bay of Biscay, (designed to reduce common dolphin deaths in fishing gear) to run again in 2027, although this time the boats affected wouldn’t all stop fishing at once, because each vessel over eight metres would choose its own 30 consecutive days between 15 January and 27 February and tell the authorities by 8 January.

PELAGIS, the French research centre that monitors dead dolphins found on beaches, estimates around 1,900 common dolphins died after being accidentally caught in fishing gear during winter 2024 to 2025. This is compared with a revised average of roughly 4,700 per winter before the closures began, although nobody counted those dolphins directly because the figures are worked out from the bodies that reach shore and computer models estimating where dead dolphins are likely to drift.

The older figures have now been recalculated using the same method, which makes the comparison between the two periods more useful, and next winter should tell us whether allowing different boats to stop fishing at different times changes the result.

Scientists gave bleaching corals probiotics during a real heatwave

During a Red Sea heatwave in summer 2022, researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology treated corals that were already bleaching with two mixtures of living bacteria thought to be helpful, as well as versions of those same mixtures where the bacteria had been killed by heat, to see whether changing the bacteria living on the coral could help it survive extreme temperatures.

After 15 days, both live treatments and one of the heat-killed treatments helped the tiny algae living inside the coral keep using sunlight to produce energy, while one live treatment and one heat-killed version also improved the researchers’ wider measure of the coral’s condition.

This is one coral species, at one site, over one fortnight, and treating individual corals by hand is a very long way from doing anything useful across an entire reef. Although it does show that researchers can test the idea on corals going through a real marine heatwave rather than only inside a laboratory.

Jersey has closed more than a fifth of its waters to trawling and dredging

On 1 September, new rules came into force around Jersey, increasing the share of the island’s waters where dredging and bottom trawling are banned from 6.5 per cent to 21.7 per cent, with the new areas covering habitats including seagrass, kelp and maerl beds, which are formed by slow-growing pink algae on the seabed.

Marine protected area percentages can be slightly deceptive because drawing a boundary around a piece of ocean doesn’t tell you very much about what people are actually allowed to do inside it. Whereas in Jersey the change is much easier to understand, because boats can no longer drag dredges or trawl nets across the seabed in those areas.

The restrictions followed three years of work involving Jersey and French fishing representatives and other groups using or trying to protect the sea.

Hard Truth From The Sea

A lot of decisions about the ocean have to be made before scientists have perfect answers, and that can mean acting while the numbers are still uncertain, whether that’s spotting trouble in a fish population years before it collapses, estimating how many dolphins died offshore from the bodies that reach the beach, or deciding how much danger fishing gear creates for a whale.

South of Kerguelen, 133,598 elephant seal dives have just made one small part of that uncertainty a little smaller.

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Luke

Between Tides is my personal column exclusively for paid subscribers. Think of it as an opinion column rather than one of my more rigorous science or policy pieces, where I write down what I’m thinking or feeling, and hopefully by the end of each one there’ll be something in there that’s useful to you too.

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In November 2019, researchers hauled a fishing net off Cornwall and found a harbour porpoise dead in the mesh, about 20 metres from one of the underwater recorders they’d attached to the gear.

The recorders were there because scientists were trying to answer a surprisingly difficult question.

Harbour porpoises use echolocation. They send out clicks and listen to the echoes coming back, which helps them find fish and work out what’s around them. Yet they still get caught in fishing nets.

Usually, researchers only see the end result. An animal comes up dead in the net, with no way of knowing exactly what happened in the minutes before it became trapped, but this time, they had a recording.

The data showed two porpoises feeding around the net before one became entangled. The trapped animal repeatedly tried to swim towards the surface and pulled the net upwards by around seven metres. The second porpoise stayed close by.

A paper published this week reconstructs what happened.

Elsewhere, researchers have tried measuring foreign fishing fleets by the iron and vitamin B12 leaving with their catch, rather than simply tonnes of fish. There’s also a strange new attempt to restrict Russian mackerel fishing, record heat has bleached corals far beyond Japan’s tropical reefs, NOAA is exploring the deep sea around American Samoa, and an Antarctic crustacean has shown just how badly some polar animals may cope as seawater becomes fresher.

Deep Dives

Scientists recorded what a harbour porpoise did before it died in a fishing net

Fishing nets fixed in place on the seabed are used all over the world. They’re cheap, effective and generally cause much less damage to the seabed than fishing methods that drag heavy gear across it.

They also accidentally catch dolphins, porpoises and other animals. That accidental catch is known as bycatch.

Porpoises regularly swim around these nets without becoming trapped. The researchers behind this new study had already recorded animals feeding close to the gear and avoiding it successfully.

So, what happens in the rare encounters where something goes wrong? Researchers from the University of St Andrews have been working with fishers to find out. They attached several hydrophones, basically underwater microphones, to fishing nets.

A porpoise produces thousands of echolocation clicks as it swims. By comparing when those clicks arrive at different microphones, researchers can work out roughly where the animal is moving around the net in three dimensions.

The event recorded off Cornwall gave them something they’d rarely had before: data showing what a porpoise was doing immediately before and during an actual entanglement.

Two harbour porpoises were feeding around the net, and one became caught. It repeatedly tried to swim towards the surface, pulling part of the net upwards by about seven metres, before eventually dying.

The sounds made by both animals also changed. They began producing unusual sequences of clicks that the researchers think were being used to communicate.

The second porpoise remained nearby for at least an hour and may have returned twice during the following five hours.

The researchers think the pair may have been a mother and a calf around a year old, with the younger animal becoming trapped. The recordings can’t prove that relationship, so it has to remain a possibility rather than a fact.

The same applies to the sounds they made. The clicks changed during an obviously unusual event, but that doesn’t mean scientists can confidently describe them as a specific porpoise “distress call”.

There’s another limit worth keeping in mind. This happened once, involving two animals, so it can’t tell us that every porpoise behaves this way when it becomes trapped. What it does give scientists is a detailed sequence of events they can start trying to understand.

The porpoises were feeding near the net. One became entangled. It tried to escape. The way both animals were communicating changed. The other animal stayed nearby. That gives researchers more to work with when they try to stop the next one happening.

The scientists themselves aren’t arguing that these nets should simply disappear, indeed for many small fishing communities, they’re an important way of making a living. Instead, researchers are working with fishers in the UK, Iceland and Sweden to test ways of making the nets safer.

One idea involves adding pearl-like beads to the nets, which may make them easier for a porpoise’s echolocation to pick up. Another involves acoustic devices that react when a porpoise approaches rather than making noise all the time.

The recording has also created new questions. The animals were feeding before the entanglement, so researchers want to know whether chasing prey changes the chance of a porpoise becoming caught.

They’re also studying whether the unusual sounds recorded during the incident could eventually help us understand when an animal is in trouble.

Those are research questions for now, nobody has proved they’ll provide the solution, and the porpoise whose death produced the recording won’t benefit from whatever researchers find next.

A study counted what leaves with foreign trawlers in iron and zinc, not just tonnes of fish

Fishing agreements tend to be described using a few familiar numbers.

How many tonnes can be caught? How much does a fishing licence cost? How much money does the catch bring in?

A paper published in npj Ocean Sustainability this week asks what happens if nutrition gets added to that calculation. The researchers looked at fish caught by foreign industrial trawlers and estimated how much calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and omega 3 was contained in those catches.

Then they ran a big “what-if” experiment. What would happen to the supply of those nutrients if the fish caught by foreign vessels had instead stayed available in the country where they were caught?

Before getting to the answer, there are some important things to know about the study.

Three of its authors work with Oceana, including David Costalago, the paper’s lead author. Oceana campaigns on fisheries policy and also provided staff time for some of the analysis and interpretation.

One of the Oceana authors was a guest editor of the journal collection where the study appears, although the journal says he had no role in reviewing this paper or deciding whether it should be published.

The authors reported no competing financial interests.

That doesn’t tell us the research is wrong. It tells us to look closely at how the result was produced, particularly when the conclusions overlap with the campaigning position of one of the organisations involved.

The model uses fishing data from 2017, and it also makes a big assumption.

It starts by treating fish caught by foreign fleets as though those fish aren’t available to people in the country where they were caught. It then creates a best-case scenario where all of that fish stays available locally instead.

That gives the researchers an idea of how much nutrition could theoretically remain in those countries, but it doesn’t tell us what people would actually eat.

Under that scenario, the researchers estimate that up to 10.6 million people, mostly in countries where nutrient deficiencies are a bigger problem, could move from having too little of a nutrient to having enough.

They also estimate that around 4.2 million people, mainly elsewhere, could lose access to enough of those nutrients because the fish would no longer be moving through the same international markets.

The researchers produced separate estimates for five different nutrients, then averaged them. So 10.6 million is not a count of 10.6 million individual people who’d become adequately nourished if foreign trawling stopped.

It’s a model showing how the availability of individual nutrients could change. There’s also a big gap between fish existing in a country and those fish reaching somebody who needs them.

They still have to be landed, sold, transported and made affordable. People need to want to eat them. Governments and fishing companies also decide where catches eventually go.

The paper recognises that. This is a what-if model showing the maximum potential supply of nutrients. It isn’t a prediction of what millions of individual people would actually eat.

Imagine two countries each lose 10,000 tonnes of fish to foreign fleets.

On paper, the number is the same, yet one catch might contain large amounts of iron, zinc and omega 3 taken from a country where people already struggle to get enough of those nutrients. The other might come from somewhere where those nutrients are already widely available.

Looking only at the weight of the catch misses that difference, but that doesn’t mean every foreign fishing agreement is harmful, or that keeping every fish at home would automatically improve people’s diets. It means governments could ask another question when deciding what access to their waters is worth.

A tonne of fish has a weight, a price and nutrients inside it. Fisheries policy has traditionally been much better at counting the first two.

A new mackerel measure targets Russia through ports, fuel and where the fish can be landed

A strange new fishing rule came into force in the North East Atlantic on Friday, involving 1,495 tonnes of Russian mackerel. The organisation behind the rule, the North East Atlantic Fisheries Commission, or NEAFC, calls that number a “stock protection reserve”.

It also makes a point of saying that it isn’t a quota.

NEAFC brings together countries and governments that manage fishing in the North East Atlantic. Its members can object to some decisions, which Russia has done in this case.

That makes it difficult to simply announce that Russia has been given a normal 1,495 tonne catch limit. Instead, the rule puts pressure on what happens after Russian vessels catch more than that amount.

Other participating countries can refuse to let those fish be landed in their ports. They can stop them being moved from one vessel to another, which is known as transhipment. They can refuse fuel and other support, and they can restrict access to their own waters.

The European Union says it has already been using similar restrictions since 3 July and has refused port entry to vessels carrying Russian mackerel caught above the threshold. The UK and Iceland have also decided to apply restrictions.

So a Russian vessel may still catch fish in international waters.

A fishing vessel needs somewhere to land its catch. It may need fuel. It may need another ship to take the fish. It may need access to somebody else’s waters, and the new rule tries to use those points as leverage.

The argument behind it is about the condition of Northeast Atlantic mackerel, as scientists at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, usually called ICES, advised that the total mackerel catch in 2026 should be no more than 174,357 tonnes.

The politics get messier when you look at what everyone else is doing. The UK, Norway, Iceland and the Faroe Islands agreed a reference catch of 299,010 tonnes for 2026. That’s around 72 per cent higher than the scientific advice.

Russia then announced its own allocation of 67,548 tonnes, which works out at 22.6 per cent of that 299,010 tonne figure. Those 67,548 tonnes is 22.6 per cent of the four-party reference catch, not 22.6 per cent of the much lower 174,357 tonnes recommended by scientists.

Russia isn’t the only party planning to catch mackerel at a level that sits above the scientific recommendation. The combined reference catch agreed by the four other coastal states already does that.

The European Commission argues that Russia’s extra allocation puts even more pressure on a depleted stock and says the new restrictions are a response to unsustainable fishing.

The interesting part is how the restriction works. NEAFC can call 1,495 tonnes a stock protection reserve rather than a normal quota. The number gains power because other countries control ports, fuel, waters and services that fishing vessels need.

Catching the fish is one part of fishing, but getting it back to land is another.

Quick Hits

Record heat bleached corals across subtropical and temperate Japan

Japan experienced an extraordinary marine heatwave in 2024, and a study published in Scientific Reports this week shows that serious coral bleaching spread well beyond the country’s tropical reefs.

Researchers surveyed corals at eight sites stretching from tropical waters in the south to much cooler areas farther north, and at most of the temperate sites, between 55 and 95 per cent of the corals they surveyed showed bleaching.

At Tsushima, researchers recorded what they describe as the first known coral bleaching there caused by extreme heat.

One site, Tateyama_, produced a particularly strange result, experiencing more than 12 degree heating weeks, which is a measure scientists use to add up how hot the water has been and how long the heat has lasted. NOAA says bleaching risk becomes serious at four degree heating weeks, while eight or more is linked with widespread bleaching and deaths among heat-sensitive corals.

Tateyama reached more than 12, and researchers found no bleaching there.

That doesn’t mean heat wasn’t important, indeed it shows that temperature alone doesn’t tell the whole story. The coral species living at a site, local conditions and what those corals have experienced in the past can all affect what happens during a marine heatwave.

NOAA is mapping the deep sea around American Samoa, including metal-rich rocks on the seabed

NOAA’s research vessel Okeanos Explorer is spending almost a month exploring deep waters around American Samoa. Scientists are using remotely operated vehicles, basically deep-sea robots controlled from the ship, alongside detailed seabed mapping.

They’re looking at seamounts, deep-sea corals, sponges, fish habitats and the water itself, and they’re also collecting basic information about polymetallic nodules.

These are metal-rich rocks that form extremely slowly on parts of the deep seabed and contain metals such as nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. They’re one of the resources at the centre of the global argument over deep-sea mining.

NOAA is collecting baseline information about what’s actually down there, including the animals, habitats, geology and mineral deposits.

That distinction matters because large parts of the deep ocean still haven’t been mapped or studied in much detail.

The first planned dive on 24 August was cancelled because of high winds. Exploration is due to continue into September, if the weather allows.

An Antarctic animal adapted to stable seawater may struggle as the ocean gets fresher

The giant Antarctic amphipod Paraceradocus miersi is a crustacean that lives in coastal Antarctic waters, waters which have historically stayed remarkably consistent in how salty they are.

Researchers wanted to know what would happen as melting ice and increased freshwater begin to change that, so they lowered the salinity, basically the saltiness of the water, from around 34.6 to 28 for periods of 12 to 48 hours.

The animals started struggling to keep the right balance of salts inside their bodies, and when researchers dropped the salinity to 22.1, they found severe and irreversible damage to the animals’ gills.

There’s a real-world comparison that makes the experiment more interesting. During a freshening event at Ryder Bay in Antarctica in 2017, salinity fell to 28.4, very close to the level used in part of the experiment.

The researchers say an event like that may harm these amphipods and could potentially kill some of them, but they didn’t actually record amphipods dying during the 2017 event, so we can’t say that happened.

This is also one species tested during short experiments in a laboratory. It doesn’t show that Antarctic seabed animals are already dying as the ocean gets fresher. It does, however, show that at least one Antarctic species has a limited ability to cope when the seawater around it suddenly changes.

Hard Truth From The Sea

Several of this week’s biggest numbers become more complicated once you look at what sits underneath them.

The 10.6 million nutrition figure comes from a best-case what-if model. NEAFC’s 1,495 tonne mackerel figure only really works because other countries control ports and fuel. In Japan, one coral site experienced extreme heat stress without bleaching even though other sites were badly affected.

The numbers are useful, but understanding what produced them is more useful.

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My wife asked me one question the other day.

“What is El Niño?”

I work with oceans every day, so I knew what it was. Explaining it simply was harder.

My first answer was that El Niño is where surface waters in the tropical Pacific get much warmer than normal… which is basically right, but the interesting part starts when you ask what “warmer than normal” actually means.

NOAA identifies El Niño when the Niño 3.4 region of the tropical Pacific is at least 0.5°C warmer than average, the temperature anomaly persists or is expected to persist across five overlapping three-month periods, and the atmosphere above it shows changes associated with El Niño.

Half a degree.

Then I looked at what is being forecast right now, and the Met Office model is showing temperatures in that same region rising to more than 3°C above average in the coming months. Professor Adam Scaife, its Head of Long Range Forecasting, said he had never seen an El Niño signal this intense in its forecasts, describing 1°C to 2°C of warming in the equatorial Pacific as typical, with 2°C already a really big event.

NOAA is also forecasting an exceptional event. On 13 August it put the chance of a very strong El Niño through autumn and winter at more than 90%. For October to December, NOAA also gave a 69% chance of a historic event on its Relative Oceanic Niño Index, or RONI, reaching +2.5°C or more, which would exceed previous El Niño events in its record going back to 1950.

So, if roughly half a degree is enough to mark El Niño conditions, what does more than three degrees mean? I can’t be the only one who thinks that this sounds completely terrifying.

The 3°C forecast does not mean the whole Pacific suddenly becomes 3°C hotter, and it certainly does not mean global temperature rises by 3°C. It is a forecast anomaly in a defined part of the tropical Pacific. Even with that caveat, it is an extraordinary number.

Warm water is only part of what changes during El Niño. Normally, trade winds blow across the tropical Pacific from east to west. They help push warm surface water towards Asia. Around South America, colder water rises from deeper in the ocean to replace it, bringing nutrients towards the surface.

During El Niño, those winds weaken. More warm water spreads east; the warm upper layer becomes deeper in the eastern Pacific, and some of that colder, nutrient-rich water has a harder time reaching the surface. Rainfall shifts with the warm water, and the atmosphere responds too.

That is how something happening in the Pacific can affect weather thousands of miles away. Warm water off South America does not directly create a storm over Britain. El Niño changes large-scale circulation in the ocean and atmosphere, and that changes the odds of different kinds of weather occurring in different places.

That changes the odds, not the forecast outside my house in November.

For the UK, the Met Office says the developing El Niño increases the chance of wetter and stormier conditions across north-west Europe during autumn and early winter.

Have you seen the colour of the UK? I appreciate that “look at the lawn” isn’t normally the opening line of a rigorous climate analysis, so I checked the numbers.

As of 18 August, 71% of England by land area was in drought. Reservoir storage was 62.6%, 16.3 percentage points below average for the time of year. Around 29 million people were living with restrictions on their water use. The Environment Agency was reporting poor grass growth, reduced crop yields and exceptionally hard ground.

So we need rain, pretty damn badly. The question I kept coming back to was what happens if a lot of it arrives at once.

Drought and flooding sound like opposites, but they can happen surprisingly close together. When soil becomes extremely dry and compacted, intense rain can struggle to soak into it quickly enough. More water runs across the surface instead. A place can badly need rain and still flood locally when too much arrives too quickly.

That does not mean El Niño is going to flood Britain. The Met Office is saying the chance of wetter and stormier conditions increases. That is a different claim, and an important one given the country’s condition going into autumn.

For me, the more interesting part is still what happens beneath the surface of the Pacific.

If less cold, nutrient-rich water reaches the surface, you can change the food web. Fish move as temperature and food change. Other animals may have to follow them.

My mind obviously goes to whales. For some whale populations, the effect can become very practical. In the northeast Pacific, research has found that El Niño conditions can disrupt krill distribution and alter blue whale presence in primary feeding areas. A whale can arrive on a familiar feeding ground and find less food there than usual. There is no universal rule saying El Niño does one particular thing to whales, but changing productivity can move the food and the animals following it.

Corals give a much more brutal example. At Jarvis Island in the central Pacific, NOAA researchers recorded hard coral cover falling from 18.7% in April 2015 to 0.4% by May 2016 during the 2015 to 2016 El Niño and prolonged marine heat stress. The corals experienced maximum heat stress for 66 consecutive weeks, and NOAA recorded mass mortality across coral groups, depths, and parts of the island.

That is the sort of consequence I mean when I say species and habitats can get absolutely hammered.

The bit I got wrong was what climate change has done to El Niño. My assumption was that El Niño was happening more regularly and that we were seeing stronger El Niños year after year.

I checked that assumption against the IPCC, and it does not hold.

The IPCC says El Niño and La Niña naturally vary a lot from one decade to the next. There is no clear evidence that they are happening more often over the long term, and scientists do not yet agree that the Pacific temperature swings linked to them will consistently become stronger this century. Those swings have been larger since 1950 than they were between 1910 and 1950, but the older records are less certain, so scientists cannot yet say this is part of a lasting trend.

The clearest projection is rainfall. The IPCC says it is very likely that the changes in rainfall linked to El Niño and La Niña will become stronger later this century as the climate warms. That doesn’t mean this particular El Niño will automatically bring extreme rain everywhere. It means that, in a warmer world, El Niño and La Niña are expected to have more influence over rainfall patterns.

So I had one part of it wrong. El Niño is natural. It has happened before, and it will keep happening. What’s changed is the climate in which these events are now taking place.

Dr Nick Dunstone, a Met Office climate scientist, says a large El Niño releases significantly more heat from the ocean into the atmosphere, with the biggest effect on global temperature often appearing in the calendar year after its winter peak. On the strength of the event now developing, he says 2027 is very likely to replace 2024 as the warmest year on record and temporarily exceed 1.5°C above the preindustrial level.

That does not mean a single year above 1.5°C is the same thing as permanently breaching the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal. It does show how much heat a large El Niño can release from the ocean into the atmosphere.

Then I started worrying about preparation. My first reaction was that we are sleepwalking into a disaster where people, species and habitats could be absolutely hammered by adverse weather while we are still enjoying barbecues because the weather is nice.

I found myself wondering where the practical advice was. If you live by a river, should you be buying sandbags? Should people be preparing their homes for bad weather? Are ordinary people actually being told what any of this means?

I was wrong about that too. The government is assessing the developing El Niño as forecasts evolve. Its 2026 resilience reporting notes that previous El Niños have increased the likelihood of mild, wet and windy conditions in early winter and drier, colder conditions later, while stressing that El Niño is only one of several climate drivers. The Environment Agency is already responding to drought, and practical flood advice tells people in at-risk areas to check their risk, sign up for warnings and make a flood plan.

So my first claim, that there was no preparation or advice, was wrong.

I still think there is a communication problem. We have El Niño headlines, drought reports, flood warnings, weather forecasts and government resilience documents.

She’d only asked me what El Niño was, and here we are!

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4,700 metres down in the North-East Atlantic, crabs, sponges and anemones are living on the outside of rusting barrels of radioactive waste. A French submersible went down this summer to look at them, decades after the barrels were dropped there.

That’s one of this week’s three. There’s also the arrival of AI data centres in the sea, and a Maine city that has just voted to stop one. And the fight to get the ocean into the text governments actually negotiate at this year’s climate summit. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.

Deep Dives

Data centres are moving into the sea. One Maine city has already hit pause.

They’re putting data centres in the sea now. Not the cables, the actual server farms.

The reason is heat. Data centres run hot, cooling them can eat a quarter or more of the electricity they use, and on land it drinks fresh water too, often somewhere that hasn’t got much. The sea is cold, it’s enormous, and it doesn’t send you a bill.

China is furthest along. There’s one sitting about 35 metres down off Shanghai, roughly 2,000 servers sealed in pods, running commercially since May on power from a nearby wind farm. Japan has a floating demonstration at Yokohama. Singapore is building a 4 storey version due to open in 2028. South Korea is working on an underwater model at Ulsan. And a startup called Panthalassa, backed by Peter Thiel, has raised $140 million for nodes that would float far out at sea, run on wave power, and beam the answers back by satellite.

It isn’t lawless out there, whatever you might read. Under the law of the sea, countries have authority over structures in their own waters, and these things go through normal planning and permits like anything else. The question is whether rules written for other kinds of infrastructure tell you much about this one.

The pitch is decent as far as it goes. Less land, less fresh water, power made where it gets used. What it doesn’t do is get rid of the heat. Shanghai’s pods pass theirs straight into the sea and Singapore’s floating design will use seawater cooling, so either way it ends up in the water, and warmer water holds less oxygen.

How much that matters, we mostly have the companies’ word for. Hailanyun, which runs the Shanghai site, points at its own monitoring and an assessment it commissioned, which found the water 3 metres downstream from a sea trial went up by less than 0.2°C. That’s one installation on its own. It tells you very little about twenty of them in the same bay.

Eastport, Maine, decided not to wait and find out. A company called DeepGreen wants to put a tidal powered data centre in the water off the town. Residents and Passamaquoddy tribal representatives objected, worried the waste heat would make the bay too warm for lobsters and take the fishing and the tourists with them. On 12 August the city council voted unanimously to block any data centre, on land or underwater, for 180 days while they work through 2 citizen initiated ordinances. The federal permit hasn’t come through either. Regulators sent the application back over missing tribal information and incomplete specifications.

There’s an odd footnote to all this. A 2024 study found you can disrupt an undersea data centre by pointing sound at it. Maintenance is harder down there, cables are harder, corrosion is harder. Meanwhile the industry is scaling, and the measurements anyone has published don’t reach that far.

The ocean has a place at the climate talks. The fight is over whether it reaches the negotiated text.

The ocean covers most of the planet and barely gets negotiated at climate summits.

COP31 is this year’s UN climate summit, in Antalya, Turkey. The ocean isn’t ignored exactly. There’s been a dialogue on it every year since Glasgow in 2021, and the summit has an oceans section in its action agenda. What the dialogue doesn’t do is produce anything a government has to sign.

African countries, the EU, Latin American nations and small island states have been pushing to change that. More than 150 experts and leaders have written to Turkey and Australia, who are running the summit between them, asking for the ocean to turn up in the texts governments actually negotiate: cutting emissions, coping with the damage, and paying for both. Turkey has told Climate Home News it’s planning a Blue COP31 roadmap, an action plan ministers will discuss next month. That isn’t the same thing.

Countries have been putting the ocean into their climate plans. A UN analysis of 119 countries that filed plans between January 2024 and April this year found 91 of them, just over three quarters, had something in there for the sea.

Then you look at the money. Of the countries that said they’d need funding for those ocean promises, close to half made the promise conditional on getting it. Ocean work has historically taken somewhere between 0.8 and 1.4 per cent of the world’s aid budget, and that budget is falling off a cliff. The OECD says aid dropped about 23 per cent in real terms last year, the steepest fall it has ever recorded, with roughly another 7 per cent expected this year.

The politics are no easier. This year’s dialogue suggested countries talk about moving away from fossil fuels, which went down badly. The Arab group’s submission opposes any report that targets particular energy sources, explicitly or otherwise. India and the Arab group both warned against putting extra burdens on developing countries.

A roadmap would give the ocean more weight in Antalya. It still isn’t a decision anyone has to keep.

A French expedition has been down to the barrels of radioactive waste on the Atlantic floor.

Between 1950 and 1990, more than 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste were dropped into the North-East Atlantic.

A French project called NODSSUM has been down to see what became of them. They mapped the site last year, then went back this May and June with around 30 scientists aboard a ship called the Pourquoi Pas? A crewed submersible made 20 dives to more than 4,700 metres. CNRS put the results out on 2 July, so this has been sitting around for a few weeks.

Several of the barrels are falling apart. Some have leaked. The team could work out what the waste had been sealed in, which was resin, bitumen and cement, and their instruments picked up radioactive elements from the waste at higher levels than you’d expect that far down.

CNRS is careful about what that means, and the careful bit keeps getting dropped from the coverage. The levels are still low. Low enough that samples came back and were handled without special radiation gear. Higher than expected isn’t the same as dangerous, and the lab work that will tell you how much is still going on.

Crabs, sponges and anemones have moved onto the barrels and are living on them. Whether the radioactivity has got into those animals is exactly what the team is now trying to establish, which is why they brought back water, sediment and creatures to test.

CNRS ran the project with Ifremer, France’s nuclear safety authority and around 15 other institutions across France, Norway, Germany and Spain. They also picked up clues that might eventually say who dropped which barrels.

Quick Hits

Someone poured 62,500 litres of lye into the Gulf of Maine. This was the first US-permitted attempt to make a patch of sea more alkaline, on the principle that more alkaline water pulls down more carbon dioxide. The Woods Hole-led LOC-NESS project ran it in August 2025, and preliminary estimates presented in Glasgow in February put the extra uptake at 2 to 10 tonnes over 4 days. The interesting part happened first. After meeting fishermen at ports and fisheries council meetings, the team moved where they were going to do it, and on the day one fisherman asked to come along as an observer, with a stipend to cover the income he lost. Rachel Davitt of Rutgers measured the lobster and herring larvae and reported no significant effect on what they looked at. What the material is matters, though: a 2026 study found dissolving olivine, a different alkaline mineral, damaged oyster embryos, while sodium carbonate didn’t.

The world’s oceans had their warmest July on record. Copernicus put the average sea surface temperature outside the polar regions at 20.96°C last month, past the previous July record of 20.89°C from 2023. That’s a July record rather than an all-time one, though the daily figure on 31 July came within 0.04°C of the hottest ever measured, in March 2024. The number that stopped me was this: intense marine heatwaves covered 27 per cent of the ocean surface at some point during the month, the widest spread in 34 years of records, well past the 22 per cent of 2024. A fast strengthening El Niño is part of it. Sea temperatures hit July records along Europe’s Atlantic coast and in the western Mediterranean, and heatwaves on that scale kill things, corals and sponges and the big seaweeds that hold underwater forests together.

Hard Truth From The Sea

There is a strange time lag in the way we treat the ocean. The decision comes first. Understanding what the decision did can take decades. More than 200,000 barrels went into the North-East Atlantic between 1950 and 1990, and scientists are still testing the animals now living on them. The servers are going in now.

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See you next week.

Luke

Several things converge this year.

That’s how I summed up a (very) long investigation for Oceanographic Magazine earlier this year.

NORI’s exploration contract was approaching the end of its original 15-year term, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) was investigating questions around companies it regulates, the rules governing commercial mining were unfinished, and in the United States, companies were beginning to use a separate permitting system established by a law passed over 40 years ago.

Most of the dates I was keep an eye out for have since arrived, and a whole lot has changed.

NORI has five more years to explore, more companies are appearing in the US application system, more governments are calling for commercial mining to wait, the International Seabed Authority has finished another round of negotiations, TMC’s most advanced US application is now in public review.

In a nutshell, this is where things stand.

The ISA is still dealing in exploration

Nauru Ocean Resources Inc, usually shortened to NORI, is a subsidiary of The Metals Company, or TMC. It signed its exploration contract with the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, on 22 July 2011 for a term of 15 years.

On 20 July this year, the ISA Council approved a five-year extension taking effect from 22 July 2026, so that keeps NORI exploring, but it still doesn’t give the company permission to mine commercially.

I covered the extension separately at the time, along with the legal dispute (which is still running) involving NORI, Tonga Offshore Mining Limited (TOML), and the ISA.

On 18 July, the Seabed Disputes Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea ordered provisional measures while the cases continue. It required the ISA to follow the relevant legal procedures in its inquiry, make clear what procedures and questions the companies were being asked to respond to, and give them a reasonable opportunity to answer.

The judges haven’t decided the underlying cases. NORI, TOML and the ISA are due to report back by 31 August 2026 on how they have complied with the orders.

The larger question of commercial mining remains unresolved too.

The ISA already has regulations covering prospecting and exploration, but what it still doesn’t have is a completed set of exploitation regulations governing commercial mining of the international seabed.

UN ocean law calls that seabed the Area. It means the seabed and ocean floor beyond any country’s national jurisdiction, along with the ground beneath them.

On 24 July, the ISA Council adopted another timetable for negotiations, and it repeated its position that commercial mining in the Area should not begin before the necessary rules and procedures are ready.

The ISA Secretariat has until 31 October 2026 to produce a draft plan for the next round, and Governments then have until 31 December to comment. Council meetings follow in March and July 2027, with the Assembly later that month.

One other decision made involved four companies, holding ISA exploration contracts, that all applied for observer status at the Assembly. They are Global Sea Mineral Resources NV, NORI, TOML and UK Seabed Resources Ltd.

Observer status would have given commercial contractors a formally recognised position at Assembly meetings even though they are not ISA member governments, but the Assembly did not grant it. However, the four companies will be allowed to attend public meetings next year in their individual capacity as contractors. They will be able to make oral statements if invited by the Assembly President and approved by the Assembly, although the decision explicitly says that this arrangement “should not be construed as the granting of observer status”, we shall have to wait and see what that looks like in practice.

How meaningful that distinction becomes will depend partly on what happens next year: who attends, who is invited to speak and how often the Assembly approves those requests.

The July meetings also failed to begin the second periodic review of the international seabed regime, a broader assessment of how the system has operated in practice.

China, Japan, India and Russia argued that starting the review now would divert staff, time and money away from completing the commercial mining rules. Germany said both jobs could happen at the same time. Canada and the UK supported further discussion of an independent and transparent review.

A larger group wanted the review to begin, including the African Group of ISA members, Belgium, France, Costa Rica, Switzerland, Finland, Greece, Malta and Australia.

Assembly President Oliver Whitehead recorded that there was no agreement, and there has therefore been plenty of procedural movement at the ISA. NORI has its extension. Negotiations have another timetable. Contractors have an interim route into public Assembly meetings. The tribunal cases continue.

What the ISA still doesn’t have is agreement on the rules that would allow commercial exploitation to begin.

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So this episode is a bit different. I’m taking you behind the scenes of the reporting and talking through what I’ve found so far, what I got wrong along the way, and the questions I’m still trying to answer.

It starts with a mangrove forest in northern Australia that has been cared for by Yirrganydji people for generations, and a surprisingly difficult question: if people have already done a brilliant job protecting somewhere, should carbon markets pay them to keep doing it?

From there I ended up trying to understand additionality, who actually controls blue carbon projects, how companies choose which carbon credits to buy, and where the money really goes.

I thought I understood the story when I started. I don’t anymore.

I’ve now got questions sitting with Verra and Evolution Markets, and I’m waiting for their answers before I write the full investigation.

For now, this is where the reporting has taken me.

About 400 metres down off the coast of Costa Rica there’s a rocky outcrop almost completely carpeted in brittle stars. Rising out of them are bright yellow corals, over a metre tall, branched like small trees. The coral had never been formally described by science. It now has a species, a genus and a whole new family of its own.

That’s one of this week’s three. The lead is a paper from Utrecht that changes how we should be thinking about the Atlantic circulation, and there’s the plastics treaty, which a year after talks broke down in Geneva has produced a new document that campaigners say is weaker than the draft that already failed. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.

Deep Dives

There may be no single temperature at which the Atlantic circulation collapses. A new paper says how fast we get there matters too.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, usually shortened to AMOC, is a system of currents that carries warm water north through the Atlantic and cold water back south. It moves an enormous amount of heat and helps shape the climate on both sides of the ocean, including ours. The number often quoted for when it could collapse is +4°C of global warming. What rarely travels with that number is the uncertainty around it, which runs from +1.4°C to +8°C.

A paper published in Nature Climate Change on 13 August, by René van Westen, Reyk Börner and Henk Dijkstra at Utrecht’s Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research, argues that a single temperature may be the wrong way to think about the risk.

They ran the same climate model three times, each with carbon dioxide climbing at a different speed: 0.5 parts per million a year, then 2.5, then 5. For comparison, carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa in Hawaii rose by an average of 2.6 parts per million a year between 2015 and 2025. In the slowest run the circulation held together all the way to +5.5°C. In the two faster ones, it began collapsing at around +2°C.

The difference is about time. Warm the ocean slowly, and the surface and the deep water have time to change together. In this simulation, more evaporation and less sea ice also leave the North Atlantic saltier, which helps hold the circulation steady. Warm it fast and the surface water becomes lighter and settles into layers that do not mix, quicker than the water below can catch up. The places where surface water sinks, which is what drives the whole circulation, close off, and the AMOC collapses.

The experiments come from one setup of one climate model. The authors found a similar stabilising response in most of the CMIP6 models they checked, the shared set of climate models used for international assessments, though those were not repeats of the same experiment. Their main model also starts with extra freshwater added to the North Atlantic to correct a known flaw. That leaves its starting AMOC at about 13 Sverdrups, meaning roughly 13 million cubic metres of water moving every second, against about 17 Sverdrups in the real ocean. The +2°C figures are measured from that model’s own starting point, so they are not the same thing as the roughly +1.5°C of warming the world has already seen.

The figure that has been travelling this week, 0.3°C a decade as a critical rate, needs handling with care. The paper does not establish 0.29°C per decade as a universal threshold. The authors take an earlier estimate in which the AMOC begins collapsing near +2.5°C around 2060 and work out that, if that happened, it would imply a warming rate of +0.29°C per decade. That sits inside a projected range of +0.27 to +0.36°C per decade.

They also say clearly that any critical rate depends on the state the climate is starting from, the stabilising mechanisms at work and the path the warming took to get there. For these experiments they avoid calling the change a “tipping point”, because they cannot show the model crossed the kind of fixed threshold that term usually implies.

Deep Brief #36 covered a different AMOC paper, and the caution there still applies. What this paper adds is one reason a single warming number can mislead: the speed of the change, and the route taken, can alter the outcome. The authors’ conclusion is much simpler. Greenhouse gas emissions need to fall as quickly as possible to reduce the risk of an AMOC collapse.

A year after plastics treaty talks broke down, the chair has published a document meant to get them moving again. Campaigners say it is weaker than the draft that already failed.

Governments have been trying since 2022 to agree on a global treaty on plastic pollution. Formal talks broke up without agreement in Geneva last August. Limits on how much plastic gets made were among the issues dividing countries, part of a wider argument over whether the treaty should reach back into production at all, or deal mainly with products, waste and recycling.

On 8 August, the new chair of the negotiating committee, Julio Cordano of Chile, published something called an Aid to Negotiations. The UN Environment Programme, which runs the process, describes it as an informal reference document. Governments have neither negotiated nor agreed it. Its purpose is to give countries something to work from as they try to narrow the gaps before formal talks resume.

It follows three video meetings of heads of delegation since March, meaning the senior negotiator each country sends, and an in-person meeting in Nairobi from 30 June to 3 July. In the note accompanying the document, Cordano confirms that countries put forward possible compromise ideas in Nairobi and that he deliberately did not put them into this first version. He wants governments to work through those ideas in the meetings ahead.

Those meetings have not included campaign groups in the same format. The UN’s published arrangements limit the heads of delegation sessions to national delegations, while the chair has run a separate series of webinars for observer organisations since 24 March so they can put their views to him.

The Environmental Investigation Agency published its assessment on 10 August and it is not gentle. Ocean Campaign Leader Christina Dixon says Cordano had described the document as one with “no surprises” and argues that it retreats from the ambition needed to end plastic pollution. Legal and Policy Specialist Amy Youngman says you cannot “gut a treaty of its obligations” and still claim success. EIA campaigns for a strong treaty, so its assessment should be read as the position of an interested party rather than a neutral description.

Cordano’s own account is different. He calls the Aid his attempt to balance the positions governments have taken so far, describes it as a living document with another version due after Bangkok, and says the next round should be used to find areas of agreement and work through what is left. The document shows where some of that disagreement sits. It contains wording, still inside square brackets to mark that nobody has agreed it, that could require countries to cut back or phase out the production and use of certain plastic products. That is a different thing from a binding limit on how much new plastic gets made in total, which is what EIA argues the treaty needs.

Delegations meet again by video on 8 and 9 September, in Bangkok from 27 to 30 September, and once more at a date still to be fixed between 25 January and 2 February. Formal negotiations are due to resume within the period from 13 to 24 March 2027, at the session known as INC 5.4.

A bright yellow coral over a metre tall has been formally described from seamounts off Costa Rica.

The seafloor there is almost carpeted in brittle stars, and out of that dense mat rise bright yellow colonies shaped like small trees. Some grow more than a metre tall. They live on seamounts, which are underwater mountains rising from the deep seabed.

The genus is Laurinque, from Laurinquë, meaning “golden tree” in Quenya, the Elvish language Tolkien devised. The species is elenya, meaning “of the stars”, for the brittle stars it grows among. Laurinque elenya.

The description was led by Odalisca Breedy at the Universidad de Costa Rica, a specialist in octocorals, the group that includes soft corals and sea fans. It was published in the open access journal ZooKeys on 30 June. The publisher highlighted it this week, so this is a discovery surfacing rather than breaking.

Working out where the coral belonged was unusually difficult. The researchers first sequenced three genes commonly used to sort corals into groups, and each one pointed towards a different family. They then turned to phylogenomics, analysing hundreds of genes at once. That showed the coral sat on its own branch of the evolutionary tree, different enough in its genes and its body to need a new genus and an entirely new family, Laurinqueidae. Families sit several rungs above species in how life is classified, so adding one is rare.

The specimens came from between 360 and 529 metres down, off Isla del Coco and along Costa Rica’s Pacific coast. They were collected by the remotely operated vehicle SuBastian during Schmidt Ocean Institute expeditions in 2019 and 2023, aboard the ships Falkor and Falkor (too). A National Geographic Society research grant also supported the work.

The paper notes that coral gardens like these are considered vulnerable marine ecosystems, a label that matters because it flags them as habitat worth protecting, since they create shelter and structure for other deep sea life.

Breedy first saw the octocoral garden in 2019. Seven years later, the animal has a scientific name: Laurinque elenya.

Quick Hits

Late Pliocene evidence challenges a textbook idea about what helps sustain the Atlantic circulation. Warm, salty water from the Indian Ocean leaks around the tip of South Africa into the Atlantic, and one longstanding explanation is that this salt supply helps support the AMOC. A paper published in Nature Geoscience on 3 August, led by Suning Hou at Utrecht University, reconstructed how much leaked during the late Pliocene, using the fossilised cysts of dinoflagellates, a kind of single-celled plankton, along with chemical traces left behind by ancient sea life in seafloor mud. Between roughly 3.6 and 3.3 million years ago, the leakage and its salt supply declined, while the AMOC grew stronger. That challenges the assumed cause and effect under those ancient conditions. The authors note that scientists still disagree about the leakage’s role in today’s climate, and that Pliocene geography and ocean conditions were not ours.

Two schools of young squid left the Pacific almost together and travelled about 30 metres through the air. This is older science resurfacing. On 25 July 2011, researchers from Hokkaido University in the Northwest Pacific photographed two schools leaving the water at once, at least 121 animals in one and 92 in the other. They stayed airborne for about three seconds and covered an estimated 26 to 34 metres, moving through four stages: launching, jetting, gliding and a controlled dive back in. Squid flight had been reported for decades. What the 2013 Marine Biology paper added was a sequence clear enough to show the animals were actively steering rather than just leaping and falling. No specimens were collected, so the researchers identified them only as ommastrephid squid, a family of fast open ocean species, very likely young neon flying squid, Ommastrephes bartramii, though they could not rule out the purpleback flying squid, Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis.

Hard Truth From The Sea

Most of what’s here is science correcting itself. A collapse threshold that turns out to depend on the route taken rather than the destination. A textbook mechanism that did not hold in the Pliocene. A coral so unlike anything known that three separate genes each pointed to a different family, and the answer was that it belonged to none of them. Odalisca Breedy first saw that coral in 2019, and it took until this year to work out what it was.

If you fancy trying a paid subscription, it opens up the full archive, every investigation and back issue. If not, that’s honestly fine. I’m glad you turn up each week for this.

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- Luke

Earlier this year, I wrote that several big decisions on deep-sea mining would converge in 2026. Most of those deadlines have now arrived. The international rules for commercial mining are still unfinished, exploration contracts are being extended, and a separate US permitting system is attracting new applicants.

“Several things converge this year.”

That’s how I ended a long investigation for Oceanographic Magazine earlier this year.

One company’s exploration contract was about to expire. Governments were still trying to finish the rules that would govern commercial deep-sea mining. Companies were asking for a more formal role inside the organisation that oversees mining on the international seabed. At the same time, a separate permitting system was beginning to attract new applicants in the United States.

If this is the first time you’ve come across deep-sea mining, the basic idea is fairly simple. Companies want to recover minerals from the deep ocean floor. Much of the attention is focused on polymetallic nodules, dark rocky lumps that form extremely slowly on the seabed and can contain manganese, nickel, copper and cobalt.

Some of the areas companies are interested in lie beyond national waters, thousands of metres beneath the surface. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) was created under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to manage mineral activity in this international seabed area for countries that are part of the treaty.

Companies can already receive exploration contracts from the ISA. These allow them to survey particular areas of seabed, collect samples, and gather information about the minerals and environment there. An exploration contract doesn’t give a company permission to begin commercial mining.

That would require a separate set of rules, usually called the Mining Code. After years of negotiations, those rules are still unfinished.

The ISA Council, which does much of the detailed work on mining rules and contracts, and the ISA Assembly, which brings together all ISA member countries, have now finished their latest meetings in Kingston, Jamaica.

Here is what changed.

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Last summer, I wrote about a Tongan proposal to give whales legal rights and remember feeling hopeful about it. With the International Whaling Commission meeting again in Hobart in September, I went back to see what happened. The campaign is still active and the Tongan model is open for feedback, but it is not an active government bill.

I remember feeling hopeful when I first wrote about this.

It was partly the idea itself. The Indigenous leaders and communities behind it have relationships with whales that go back generations. The proposal was trying to turn some of that relationship into something the law could actually recognise. Instead of another campaign asking governments to protect whales better, this was asking whether whales could have legal rights of their own. The people behind the current consultation describe whales as kin and fellow voyagers across the Pacific.

I thought it was clever. It was also quite different from most of the whale protection work I had spent years looking at.

What I remember most from last summer is Princess Angelika Lātūfuipeka Tukuʻaho and the passion behind what she was saying. Speaking in Nice in June 2025, she called for whales to be recognised “not merely as resources but as sentient beings with inherent rights”.

The Huelo Matamoana Trust was working with legal experts on the Whales (Legal Personhood and Protection) Act 2025. According to Melino Maka, the trust’s chair, the proposed law would recognise whales as legal persons, give them rights including life, migration and a healthy habitat, and create a guardianship system that could represent their interests in legal proceedings.

Once the draft had been refined, he expected it to be formally introduced into Tonga’s Parliament.

There are plenty of declarations, petitions and promises in conservation. This sounded like it might actually become law.

So, what happened to it?

The question came back into my head recently because we have been talking about the next IWC meeting it in the office, and the arguments governments are going to bring with them, and somewhere in the middle of all that I remembered Tonga.

More than a year had passed. The humpbacks were back in Tongan waters. Had the personhood proposal ever made it to Parliament?

There is already strong legal protection for whales from direct harm in Tonga. The IWC records that King Taufa’ahau Tupou IV banned whaling by royal decree in 1978. The following year Parliament amended the Whaling Industry Act so that the wounding, capture, taking or killing of whales of any species was prohibited unless approved by the Privy Council.

The rules in force today go further in some respects. Regulation 16 of Tonga’s Fisheries Management (Conservation) Regulations says nobody may fish for, harm or interfere with a marine mammal in Tongan fisheries waters. Whales and dolphins are explicitly included. Limited written authorisation is possible only in exceptional circumstances for international scientific research intended to benefit marine mammals without harming the species.

The personhood idea was trying to add something different. Rather than only controlling what humans are allowed to do to whales, it would recognise rights held by the whales themselves and create bodies able to represent those interests.

The wider campaign never disappeared. In fact, it was already bigger than Tonga when I first wrote about it. On 20 November 2024, the Pacific Whale Fund, Simmons & Simmons and Ocean Vision Legal launched Te Mana o Te Tohorā, proposed model legislation designed to give governments a route towards recognising whale personhood in their own laws.

The idea remains active elsewhere too. In February this year, Green MP Teanau Tuiono lodged the Tohorā Oranga Bill in New Zealand, a proposed member’s bill, put forward by an individual MP rather than the government, that would recognise inherent rights for whales there.

The Tongan part is where things get more complicated.

On 12 June this year, the Moananui Sanctuary Trust released two model legal frameworks for public consultation. One is the Mafai ‘o e Tofua’a Climate Bill for Tonga. The other is a French Polynesian version of Te Mana o Te Tohorā. The Trust says the drafts were developed over two years with Ocean Vision Legal and Simmons & Simmons, alongside local community leaders, and that the initiative is supported by a petition signed by more than 450,000 people.

People can already read the Tongan text and respond to it. The Moananui Sanctuary website now has a “Make a Submission” link alongside the Mafai ‘o e Tofua’a proposal.

The documents themselves are “not active government bills, but models” designed to invite feedback. That is different from what I wrote about last summer.

In June 2025, Maka said he expected a Tongan draft Act to be formally introduced into Parliament once it had been refined. In June 2026, the campaign released the Tongan framework as a model for public consultation and said itself that it is not an active government bill.

I cannot tell from the published record whether the Mafai ‘o e Tofua’a framework is a rewritten version of the 2025 Act, a replacement for it or a separate strand of the wider campaign. I don’t think it is responsible to guess. What we can see is that the public status being described today is different from the parliamentary expectation Maka described a year ago.

That does not mean the idea has gone away. Clearly it hasn’t. The regional campaign remains active, the legal work is continuing and people can submit comments on the Tongan model right now.

What Tonga does not yet have is a published date for the consultation events the campaign said would happen there.

The 12 June announcement gave dates for consultations in Papeete, Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea, Bora Bora and Maupiti during the Āvei Moana expedition, a voyage carrying the campaign across the Pacific. For Tonga, it simply said the dates would be released soon.

I searched again on 10 August across the campaign’s website, Ocean Vision Legal, Tonga’s Parliament news, Matangi Tonga, Kaniva Tonga, Tonga Independent and published material from the Āvei Moana expedition, and found no subsequently published date for those events.

There are signs the community work is continuing. Ocean Vision Legal, one of the campaign’s legal partners, wrote in June that collaborators were developing community consultation, storytelling and education alongside any future legal reforms. None of that material gives dates for the Tongan events.

That is where the story sits now.

I still think the original idea is clever. There is something powerful about Indigenous leaders and communities with long relationships with whales trying to give those relationships legal force. The work has moved on since last summer, and the fact that there is now a model people can actually read and respond to is meaningful progress.

The difficult bit comes next. If the rights in that model are going to become enforceable in Tonga, at some point the model still has to make the jump into law.

The campaign said Tonga's dates would come soon. That was two months ago. The whales are there now.

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In May 2022 campaigners flew a drone over the water off Storstappen Island, in the far north of Norway. Below it a minke whale, struck by a harpoon from the vessel KATO, thrashed at the surface. A former UK deputy chief veterinary officer who reviewed the footage put the time it took to die at twenty minutes and twenty-eight seconds.

Norway has raised the number of minke whales its hunters can kill this year to 1,641. That’s where we start. I’ve also got a study on whether we should be feeding iron to the Southern Ocean to pull carbon out of the sky, and what happened to a coral reef when rats got onto the islands beside it. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.

Deep Dives

Norway raised its minke whale quota to 1,641 this year. It scrapped the monitoring in 2023.

On 30 January the Norwegian fisheries ministry set this year’s quota at 1,641 minke whales, up 235 on last year. Whale and Dolphin Conservation, which published a report on the hunt this week, calls it the largest commercial whaling quota in the world.

Norway kills whales legally because it objected to the international ban when it came in. A country that objects isn’t bound by it. Norway sets its own limits and reports its own results, and the International Whaling Commission has no power to stop it.

Ten boats went out last year and killed 429 whales, about a third of what the government permitted.

Nobody independent watched them do it. Government inspectors came off the boats in 2006, replaced by an electronic recorder that logged the vessel’s position, engine speed and shots fired. On 23 March 2023 the ministry scrapped the requirement for that too. An inspector can still be sent, at the Directorate of Fisheries’ discretion. Otherwise the hunt goes unobserved and the boats report their own catch.

Everything we now learn about how these whales die comes from the whalers.

The last proper welfare study covered the 2011 and 2012 seasons. It found 82 per cent of whales died instantly. Forty-nine did not. For those, the average time to death was six minutes, and some took more than twenty. Norway has published nothing comparable in the fifteen years since.

Of the 429 killed last year, 287 were female. The charity’s analysis of Norway’s catch reports puts the pregnancy rate among females killed at around 60 per cent for 2025. That is roughly 170 whales carrying a calf that died with her.

Norway would say, fairly, that this is what the biology produces. Minke whales breed year-round and a female can carry a calf almost every year, so a high pregnancy rate among the mature females killed is close to what you would expect in any large sample. Nobody picks them out. The government’s broader position is that the North Atlantic minke population is large and the hunt takes a small share of it. Fisheries Minister Marianne Sivertsen Næss said in January that the population is “in very good condition”.

One per cent of Norwegians now eat whale meat regularly, down from four per cent in 2019, according to polling by Respons Analyse for the animal welfare group NOAH. The quota went up by 235 whales for a market that has almost entirely left.

Disclosure: I’m Head of Hunting and Captivity at Whale and Dolphin Conservation, which published this week’s report. Quota, catch and regulation figures come from the Norwegian government’s own records. Where a number is the charity’s analysis, I’ve said so.

Scientists have worked out where you could dump iron in the ocean to pull carbon from the air. Most of it comes straight back out.

The idea is decades old. Across big stretches of ocean, the microscopic plants drifting near the surface have everything they need to grow except iron. Add iron and they bloom. Blooming plants pull carbon dioxide out of the water, the water pulls more from the air to replace it, and when the plants die and sink some of that carbon goes down with them.

A study published in Nature on 29 July, led by Jun Yu at the University of California, Irvine, ran a global ocean model across ten regions, simulated sixty years of fertilising, then watched what happened after it stopped.

Sixty years of it removed the equivalent of between 1.1 and 5.3 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide. More than half came back out within decades. For scale, carbon dioxide has gone up by more than 140 parts per million since the industrial revolution.

Where you do it changes what you break. Fertilising the equatorial Pacific expanded the ocean’s oxygen-poor zones and cut the biomass of the larger drifting animals that fish and whales feed on. The same thing in the Southern Ocean took up comparable carbon with less damage.

The authors are careful about the model. It’s one model rather than an ensemble, and the way it handles plankton carries real uncertainty. They’re blunter about the money. Fertilise one patch of sea and the effects travel, so the carbon removed and the harm caused surface somewhere other than where you did the work. That disconnect, they write, “complicates robust carbon crediting”.

A carbon credit needs someone to certify that a specific amount of carbon came out, that it stayed out, and that one particular act did it. On these findings, iron fertilisation fails all three. The work was funded by the US Department of Energy, NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Rats that got ashore on Indian Ocean islands have quietly rewired the reefs offshore. The fix is one conservationists already know how to do.

The arc-eye hawkfish is about the length of your finger, orange and pink, and it likes to perch on a coral head and wait. Around some islands of the Chagos Archipelago it’s thriving and around others it isn’t, and the reason has nothing to do with the water.

It has to do with rats. Where rats got ashore off ships, they ate the eggs and chicks of nesting seabirds and the colonies collapsed. Where rats never landed, the birds are still there in extraordinary numbers. Work published in Nature in 2018 measured the difference at roughly 760 times the seabird density on rat-free islands.

Seabirds feed out at sea and come back to the island to roost, and their droppings wash off the land onto the reef around it. The birds fertilise the reef. Take the birds away and the reef loses its supply.

A study in Ecology this week, led by Laura-Li Jeannot at Lancaster University, followed that loss down into the smallest layer of reef life. Cryptofauna are the tiny animals living in the cracks and rubble, the little fish and shrimps and worms that almost nobody counts and nearly everything eats. Near rat-free islands, Jeannot’s team found the small fish outweighed the small invertebrates by more than five to one. Near islands with rats, the two were about level.

That matters because of what eats them. Small fish grow fast, die young and get replaced quickly, which makes them a steady supply of food for predators like the hawkfish. Invertebrates turn over more slowly. A reef that swaps one for the other is still busy, and it’s passing less energy upward.

Jeannot won’t call it collapse. Some species gain from the seabirds being gone. Nutrient-loss impacts “are not uniform”, she says. “There are winners and losers.”

What makes this different from most reef research is that the problem has a known solution. Getting rats off an island is a defined job with a method, a cost and an end point, and it’s been done on islands all over the world. This study says the payoff doesn’t stop at the waterline.

Quick Hits

Whale watchers off Western Australia counted about 60 per cent fewer humpbacks than usual in June, and a week later birdwatchers on the east coast were finding albatrosses and petrels a long way from where they should have been, a lot of them in poor condition. Writing in The Conversation this week, Mary-Anne Lea of the University of Tasmania and oceanographer Christopher Chapman set those sightings against marine heatwaves running in the Tasman Sea since April, and against Australia’s first confirmed case of H5N1 bird flu in a migratory seabird. They stop well short of a conclusion. These are reports from people who watch wildlife for a living or for love, not survey data, and the authors say plainly that “monitoring in the Southern Ocean is limited”. The Antarctic fur seal joined the endangered list in April, after its population at South Georgia fell by around 1.5 million animals.

A modelling study has asked whether a climate system can cross a tipping point and come back. Sacha Sinet and colleagues at Utrecht University, writing in the journal Chaos this week, paired the Greenland ice sheet with the Atlantic circulation that carries warm water north through the ocean. Modelling consistently finds that a collapse of that circulation would cool northwest Europe and shift rainfall belts a long way beyond it. Sinet’s result is that whether it recovers depends on how tightly the two systems are linked and how fast each one responds, and that for some rates of Greenland melt it can cross its threshold and still come back. The work is deliberately simplified and the finding holds best for small overshoots. It’s maths about the shape of the problem rather than a forecast.

Hard Truth From The Sea

The thing about the ocean is how slowly it answers. Rats came off a ship onto a Chagos island and the reef a mile offshore was quietly rearranging itself for years before anyone noticed. The iron paper says the same, that carbon put in one ocean surfaces in another decades later. Norway will take whales this season and we won’t know what that did to the North Atlantic for a long time yet, if we ever do. Whatever’s behind the humpbacks not turning up in June has probably been building for years.

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Luke

The International Seabed Authority approved a five year extension of NORI’s deep sea exploration contract while its inquiry into the contractor’s possible non compliance remained unresolved, days after an international tribunal ordered fair treatment in both procedures.

In the spring, I wrote a special feature for Oceanographic Magazine about deep sea mining. It ended with a date. NORI’s exploration contract, the one behind Nauru’s 2021 decision to trigger a two year countdown for the mining rules, was due to expire in late July 2026. I wrote that whatever happened next would happen fast.

It did. Over one weekend, an international tribunal ordered the regulator to give NORI a fair process. Two days later, the ISA Council approved a five year extension of the contract.

The short version

A company called NORI holds a contract from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to explore part of the deep Pacific seabed. The contract lets it map the area, collect samples and test equipment. It does not let the company begin commercial mining.

While the ISA was still trying to write the rules for deep sea mining, another subsidiary of The Metals Company, TMC USA, applied to the United States for two exploration licences under a separate American legal system. NORI, a different subsidiary in the same corporate group, continued to hold its ISA exploration contract.

The ISA then opened an inquiry into whether NORI was still meeting the terms of its existing contract.

NORI challenged that inquiry in an international court. The judges refused to stop it, but told the ISA to make its questions clearer and give NORI a fair chance to answer them.

Two days later, with the inquiry still unfinished, the ISA Council approved another five years for NORI’s exploration contract.

Every step could be defended by reference to a rulebook. The Chamber ordered safeguards for the rights NORI claimed. The inquiry remained open. The Commission assessed the extension under the ISA’s existing procedures and recommended approval. The result was that the Council approved another five years for a contractor whose possible non compliance remained unresolved.

Hamburg, Saturday

On Saturday 18 July 2026, judges in Hamburg delivered an order in a legal fight over the deep Pacific seabed.

The judges sit on a panel called the Seabed Disputes Chamber, part of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the court that settles arguments under the UN treaty governing the oceans. The Chamber exists to resolve legal disputes about the seabed beyond any country’s waters.

In thirty years, nobody had brought it a case between two opposing sides. In June this year, two arrived, both filed by subsidiaries of the same company.

On one side of Case No. 34 was Nauru Ocean Resources Inc., known as NORI, the company holding the exploration contract at the centre of the case. NORI is owned by The Metals Company, a Canadian business pursuing a commercial effort to mine polymetallic nodules from the deep seabed.

The Pacific island state of Nauru sponsors NORI under the treaty because a company can hold a seabed contract only with the backing of a state.

On the other side was the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, the organisation of 172 members that governs mining on the seabed beyond national waters.

NORI has held an exploration contract with the ISA since 22 July 2011. The contract allows it to map an area, collect samples and test its machines. It does not authorise commercial mining.

NORI wanted the judges to intervene before the full case was heard. It asked for six provisional measures, the emergency orders a court can issue to protect one side’s rights while a dispute is still running.

The biggest would have suspended the ISA’s inquiry into whether NORI had kept to the terms of its contract. The Chamber refused.

What it ordered instead was about fairness. The ISA must give NORI due process, which means the company must be able to understand the questions it is being asked and have a proper chance to answer them.

In the days that followed, both sides presented the order as supporting their position.

What is at stake

NORI’s contract covers an area of the Clarion Clipperton Zone, a vast stretch of deep Pacific seabed between Hawaii and Mexico.

The zone contains polymetallic nodules, potato sized rocks that form over millions of years and hold nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper. The nodules are also part of the habitat. Most of the seabed there is soft mud, and they provide rare hard surfaces on which animals such as sponges and corals can grow.

Thousands of species have been recorded in the zone, many of them new to science.

No commercial deep sea mining has taken place there. The rules that would govern it, known collectively as the Mining Code, have been under negotiation since 2011 and remain unfinished.

The ISA is required to organise access to the seabed while protecting the marine environment and ensuring that developing countries share in any future benefits.

Specialist legal publications covered the tribunal’s ruling. The contract decision that followed received far less attention. Ocean Rising assembled the sequence from the Chamber’s order and press summary, the ISA’s statements and session documents, The Metals Company’s filings, and the independent daily record of the negotiations kept by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

How the fight started

The story runs on two tracks. One is about whether NORI broke the rules. The other is about whether its contract should be renewed. The same institution was handling both at once.

The first track began on 21 July 2025, when the ISA Council, its 36 member executive body, asked the Secretary General to seek more information from companies that might not be meeting their contract obligations.

The concern was that a company could keep its ISA contract while seeking permission to mine through a different legal system.

Another subsidiary of The Metals Company, TMC USA, had applied to NOAA, the United States ocean agency, for two exploration licences under a 1980 American law. The applications came days after President Donald Trump signed an executive order intended to speed up seabed mining.

NOAA has determined that both applications comply with the applicable information requirements. That is a procedural finding, not permission to explore. Decisions on whether to grant the licences remain pending.

The United States never ratified the treaty that created the ISA. The ISA’s position is that only it can lawfully regulate mining in the international seabed area.

In January 2026, the Secretary General sent questions to all 21 companies holding exploration contracts. NORI replied that it considered the Council’s decision unlawful.

In March, the ISA’s expert body, the Legal and Technical Commission, identified two contractors needing specific attention for possible non compliance. On 16 March, NORI was told it was one of them.

The second track was already running.

NORI’s fifteen year contract was due to expire in late July 2026. On 19 January, it had applied for a five year extension. The same Commission responsible for the possible non compliance inquiry was also assessing whether to recommend the extension.

On 5 June, NORI took the ISA to court, bringing the first case of its kind in the Chamber’s history. Its sister company, Tonga Offshore Mining Limited, filed the second.

Both asked the Chamber to freeze the inquiry. Public hearings were held in Hamburg on 2 and 3 July.

What the judges ordered

The Chamber’s order came on 18 July and was unanimous.

The judges found NORI’s claim to fair treatment plausible. They also found a “real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice” to the rights NORI claimed.

They ordered the ISA to follow the correct legal process in both the inquiry and the extension, and to make its questions clear enough for NORI to answer properly. Both sides must report back by 31 August 2026 on how they have complied.

The order also recorded a formal promise the ISA made during the hearings. NORI’s extension application would be handled fairly and lawfully, and the extension process would remain separate from the inquiry.

The inquiry stayed open.

The Metals Company, Greenpeace Canada and the ISA then emphasised different parts of the same order.

The Metals Company told investors that the Chamber had protected its subsidiaries’ rights. Gerard Barron, the company’s chief executive, said the order showed that the ISA’s conduct was now “subject to meaningful judicial oversight”.

Greenpeace Canada pointed to the Chamber’s refusal to stop the inquiry.

The ISA said the order did not decide the merits, meaning the main legal questions in the case, and that it would continue carrying out its mandate.

All three descriptions are accurate. They simply point to different paragraphs.

The tribunal had decided what protections NORI would have while the cases continued. It had not decided what would happen to the contract.

That decision came in Kingston on the Monday.

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An olive ridley turtle somewhere off the Tamil Nadu coast is swimming through a current that carries, alongside the fish and the plankton, a tangle of abandoned nets, nylon ropes, styrofoam buoys and plastic rope. She doesn’t know what any of it is. She just knows the flipper is caught.

It’s Plastic Free July, a month that usually fills up with reusable coffee cups and Instagram posts about individual choices. This week I want to stay closer to the water. Three deep dives: what actually happens to a sea turtle caught in a ghost net, what the Ocean Cleanup saga tells us about how we solve hard ocean problems, and what the smallest nations on the planet are asking the world’s biggest packaging companies to do. Two quick hits and a hard truth to close.

Deep Dives

On India’s east coast, a woman has spent 24 years pulling ghost nets out of the ocean with the help of the fishermen who set them.

Supraja Dharini, the founder of Tree Foundation, has a rehabilitation centre for injured sea turtles and the permission of two state governments to run it. What fills it is ghost nets.

A ghost net is not a net someone is using. It’s gear that was lost in a storm or abandoned deliberately, still drifting, still catching everything it was designed to catch. Nylon rope. Polypropylene mesh. Styrofoam buoys. Plastic rope. Rubber. All of it moves with the currents, tangling around flippers and necks. Turtles trying to get free only pull the net tighter. Dharini’s team has found olive ridleys, green turtles, hawksbills and leatherbacks with flippers half-amputated, or with nylon embedded in their necks. Some survive. Many don’t.

India’s east coast is one of the most important sea turtle habitats on the planet. Olive ridleys nest here. Green turtles and hawksbills forage here. Leatherbacks show up as bycatch during fishing season. Ghost nets pile up near the harbours and ports, where shipping vessels have been discarding their own waste at sea rather than pay to offload it onshore.

In 2021 Dharini started paying fisherfolk to collect what they find. When a boat comes across a floating ghost net, the crew pulls it in, documents any entangled species, releases anything still living, and brings the net back to shore. The incentive goes straight into their bank accounts, split: 50 per cent to the fisherman, 50 per cent to his wife, or his mother if he’s unmarried. So far they’ve pulled more than 200 tonnes of ghost nets from just the Chennai and Chengalpattu coast.

The retrieved nets don’t sit in a pile. Some have been shredded and pressed into footpaths. In June this year, a road was laid using ghost-net aggregate. Fisherfolk who weave for a living have been working with artists to build life-size models of marine animals from the segregated material, displayed in coastal resorts.

It’s taken 24 years. Dharini is characteristically straight about that. Building trust with fishing communities is slow work, and the sea is not waiting. Every piece of net that makes it back to shore is one less death trap. She knows exactly how many pieces are still out there.

The Ocean Cleanup raised hundreds of millions of dollars and spent more than a decade trying to scoop plastic out of the Pacific. Scientists warned from the beginning it wouldn’t work. They were right, but the story is more complicated than that.

In 2012, an 18-year-old Dutch student named Boyan Slat gave a TED talk about a device that would clean the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It went viral. The idea attracted millions in donations and years of breathless media coverage. It also attracted, from very early on, a group of scientists who thought the whole premise was wrong.

To understand why, you have to know what the Great Pacific Garbage Patch actually is. It isn’t a floating island of waste you could walk on. It’s more like a soup, most of it crumb-sized pieces of plastic, often too small to see clearly. The soup is threaded through with wildlife, because this region isn’t a biological desert, it’s full of neuston, the community of animals and larvae that live right at the sea surface and depend on the same floating material for shelter and food. Any device big enough to catch crumb-sized plastic would inevitably catch the animals living among it.

Dr Miriam Goldstein, now executive director of the National Ocean Protection Coalition, and Dr Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer, published a detailed technical review of the proposed Ocean Cleanup device in 2014. They identified specific reasons why it couldn’t function as described. They were subsequently proved right, in order: a 2016 small-scale test broke for exactly the structural reasons Martini said it would, and failed to collect significant plastic for exactly the physical reasons Goldstein and others described. In breaking, it briefly became ocean pollution itself.

The Ocean Cleanup has adapted over time, and in fairness it should be said they have. Their river interceptor programme, which catches plastic before it reaches the ocean, is the kind of upstream approach their critics had been suggesting since 2015. As of early 2026, they report having removed more than 50 million kilograms of waste from rivers and oceans combined, and they spent more than $72 million across their 2022-2024 fiscal years.

The trouble is the gap between claim and scrutiny. The organisation says its latest open-ocean designs have low adverse impact on marine wildlife, a position their own paper in Scientific Reports, published in 2025, was written to support. Independent scientists have challenged that conclusion. The supplementary materials of the same paper catalogue thousands of marine animals killed during Ocean Cleanup operations, including loggerhead, green and olive ridley sea turtles, classed as vulnerable or endangered, and fish from three species of sharks. The organisation characterises much of the bycatch as invasive species. The marine scientists interviewed by Dr David Shiffman for The Revelator this week do not agree with that characterisation, and dispute whether the paper’s methodology captures the full scale of harm.

Dr Clark Richards, a physical oceanographer at Fisheries and Oceans Canada, summed up the river interceptor pivot this way: the design was clearly based on existing solutions like Mr Trash Wheel in Baltimore, rather than working with the organisations that had been doing it for years, and came at considerably higher cost.

The Ocean Cleanup told Shiffman by email that their river interceptors are custom-designed for each river and that they are working to improve cost efficiency.

The lesson here isn’t simply that the Ocean Cleanup failed, because that framing is too easy. Scientists were ignored when they raised concerns, then criticised as haters when they persisted. The real lesson, which Dr Rebecca Helm and Dr Goldstein both point toward, is about what happens when a compelling vision gets more traction than the unglamorous evidence. The solution to ocean plastics is upstream: reduce production, change packaging, improve waste infrastructure. That’s harder to film for a TED talk, and it’s also the only thing that scales.

The smallest nations on the planet are asking the packaging industry a simple question: why are you sending this stuff to us when you know we can’t deal with it?

The Cook Islands is a scattered chain of fifteen small islands across 1.8 million square kilometres of the South Pacific. It has no large-scale recycling infrastructure, limited landfill space, and almost total dependence on imported goods, which means almost total dependence on imported packaging. It is surrounded by ocean.

Halatoa Fua, director for the Cook Islands’ National Environment Service, made an argument this week that is worth sitting with. For island economies, he says, the challenge runs from product design through import dependency, shipping costs and limited land to the absence of anything big enough to process a large volume of packaging waste. The plastic that gets dumped or blown into the sea from an island like this didn’t start there. It arrived in containers from somewhere else.

The position of Pacific and Caribbean island nations in the global plastic conversation is uncomfortable. They produce a tiny fraction of the world’s plastic waste, bear a disproportionate share of what ends up in the ocean, and the treaty that was meant to address the upstream problem, the UN Global Plastics Treaty, has failed to pass two deadlines and remains unfinished.

James Atherton, a conservation expert and former president of the Samoa Conservation Society, points to a sharp example. In 2021, he says, Coca-Cola switched from reusable glass bottles to single-use plastic in Samoa. A recent study found that food and beverage plastic packaging is one of the most common sources of litter on coastlines worldwide. From 2000 to 2023, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Nestlé produced around 138 million metric tonnes of plastic, of which between 8 and 11 per cent was recycled.

The industry has responses to this, and they are not entirely dishonest. Plastic packaging protects food. Switching to alternatives can increase food waste, which is its own environmental problem. Lightweighting and recyclability are real areas of investment.

Fua’s point cuts through the qualifications. The most effective solution, he says, is to stop problematic plastic packaging before it becomes waste, before it reaches the islands, and before it enters the ocean. That is a product-design argument, and it is aimed squarely at the companies that make the decisions upstream.

Quick Hits

The shipping industry has published new guidelines for reducing plastic in its own procurement. The Safety4Sea report, released this week, sets out a framework for shipping companies to assess the plastic content of what they buy, from packaging to equipment, and to favour suppliers with lower plastic footprints. The shipping sector is one of the least-discussed sources of ocean plastic. Industry self-regulation through procurement guidelines is a low-enforcement mechanism, and the guidelines don’t have teeth in themselves. What they establish is a standard that can be cited, audited against, and eventually demanded by port authorities, insurers and charterers.

The case for catching plastic in rivers rather than oceans keeps getting stronger, but the numbers people reach for need care. A widely circulated figure holds that around 1,000 rivers, roughly 1 per cent of the world’s rivers, carry the majority of the plastic that reaches the ocean. The figure comes from a 2017 study and has since been challenged by later analysis questioning both the methodology and the proportion. What is not in dispute is the principle: plastic travels to the ocean through rivers and coastal runoff over days and weeks, and catching it at river mouths is considerably easier than chasing crumb-sized fragments across open water. The Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup has removed more than 400 million pounds of waste from beaches and coastal areas since 1986, with more than 19 million volunteers, at a total annual plastics budget of around $6 million. The numbers are genuinely striking compared to $72 million for Ocean Cleanup’s 2022-2024 operations.

Hard Truth From The Sea

The turtle off the Tamil Nadu coast doesn’t know it’s Plastic Free July. She doesn’t know about the TED talk or the treaty or the procurement guidelines. She just knows the net is tightening. Supraja Dharini has been pulling those nets out for 24 years. The question this month isn’t really about individual choices. It’s about who decides what goes into the ocean in the first place, and whether they’re being asked to account for it.

Paid subscribers fund the accountability journalism that keeps asking that question, week after week. If you want to support my ongoing investigations that hold governments and companies to account, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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- Luke

At 2.15pm on Friday, the UK formally ratified the High Seas Treaty, a global agreement designed to protect marine life across the huge stretches of ocean that lie beyond any country’s borders. Those waters cover nearly two thirds of the ocean. Until now, governments have had no single global process for creating marine protected areas across them.

That story opens a Deep Brief that moves from the United Nations to lobster pots in south west England, where fishers are finding octopuses alongside broken shells as the water warms. The third deep dive goes much deeper, into internal waves up to 300 metres high and the tiny movements climate models still have to simplify. There are three deep dives, three quick hits and one hard truth from the sea.

Deep Dives

The UK has ratified the High Seas Treaty. Here is what it is, what it can do, and what still has to happen.

The High Seas Treaty primarily concerns marine life in areas of the ocean that are not under the control of any country.

Coastal countries have rights over the waters and natural resources close to their shores. Beyond those national zones lies a vast shared ocean used by migrating whales, sharks, turtles and seabirds, as well as fishing fleets, cargo ships and scientific expeditions. These waters are known as the high seas. Together with the international seabed that also lies beyond national control, they make up what the treaty calls areas beyond national jurisdiction.

There were already rules out there. International organisations regulate shipping, fishing and seabed mining, while other agreements cover issues such as pollution and endangered species. The problem was the gaps between them. There was no single global system through which countries could propose a marine protected area and coordinate the different activities taking place inside it.

The new treaty creates that route. A country, or a group of countries, can propose an area for protection. The proposal must explain what lives there, what threatens it, how it would be managed and how success would be measured. Other governments, scientists, communities and organisations can comment before the countries that have joined the treaty make a decision.

The agreement does three other important things. It sets a process for checking the environmental damage that a planned activity might cause. It creates rules for sharing benefits from marine genetic resources, meaning biological material from ocean plants, animals and microbes that could be useful in medicine, agriculture or technology. It also promises training, equipment and scientific support for countries that would otherwise struggle to take part.

Ratification is the formal step through which a country agrees to be bound by a treaty. The UK signed the agreement in September 2023, passed the legislation needed to put it into British law, then deposited its ratification document with the United Nations on Friday. The treaty itself entered into force internationally in January and the United Nations listed 91 parties on 10 July.

Nothing became protected at 2.15pm on Friday. The agreement creates the legal machinery, while governments still have to build and operate it. They need to agree budgets and procedures, appoint scientific bodies, decide how proposals will be assessed and work out how new protections will sit beside the organisations that already regulate fishing, shipping and seabed activity.

The first Conference of the Parties will take place in January 2027. That phrase simply means the first formal meeting of the countries bound by the agreement. It may sound like another international conference, although its early decisions will shape who gets heard, what evidence is required and how quickly the first protected areas can move from proposals to decisions.

There is a fair reason for doing this carefully. A protected area with weak science, no money and no credible management plan can look impressive on a map while changing very little in the water. Countries with smaller governments and research teams also need enough support to participate on equal terms.

The same caution could slow the system for years, as fishing, shipping, pollution and climate change continue across the waters under discussion. Governments spent more than a decade negotiating the treaty. Its value will eventually be judged through the places and species it protects.

Friday secured the UK’s place at the table, and its record will be built from the protected areas it supports, the money and expertise it contributes, and the positions it takes when agreement becomes difficult.

Lobster pots in south west England are coming back with octopuses and broken shells as the sea heats up.

A photograph published by Plymouth Marine Laboratory this week shows two common octopuses inside a lobster pot in south Devon. Between them lies what is left of a lobster.

The common octopus is native to British waters, although it has usually been rare here and is more common in the warmer seas of southern Europe and the Mediterranean. Numbers began rising sharply across the south west early in 2025. The bloom, the term scientists use for a sudden rise in abundance, has continued for well over a year.

Plymouth Marine Laboratory keeps a record of marine life in the western English Channel stretching back to 1903. Professor Matt Frost described the current abundance as unprecedented within that record. PML also reported that more than 100 tonnes of common octopus passed through Brixham fish market in a single day.

Some fishers have been able to turn that arrival into an income. Jack West, a scallop fisher from Mevagissey, switched to catching octopus and built a market with local pubs and restaurants. He told PML last week that his boat was landing between 800 kilograms and 1.5 tonnes a day.

The experience has been very different for crab and lobster boats. Common octopuses are highly effective shellfish predators. Fishers have reported pots containing empty shells, damaged catch or octopuses where they expected to find lobsters and crabs. Beshlie Pool of South Devon and Channel Shellfishers described it as “a very difficult time for our community”.

Warm water appears to be a major part of the explanation, although it is not the whole story. A report involving the Marine Biological Association, Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Plymouth found that every major octopus bloom recorded in the region had coincided with unusually warm conditions. Sustained easterly winds may also have carried young octopuses from the Channel Islands and northern France, while breeding that was once rare in UK waters became widespread during 2025.

The sea around Britain is unusually warm again now. A marine heatwave is a period when the water stays much warmer than the normal range for that location and season. It does not mean the sea has reached one fixed temperature. A summer temperature that is normal off Spain could still be extreme off England.

At the start of July, much of the English and Welsh coast, the English Channel and the central and southern North Sea was experiencing a Category 2 marine heatwave, classified as strong. Sea surface temperatures in those areas were roughly 1.5°C to 4°C above normal, and parts of the North Sea were forecast to reach 4°C to 5°C above average. The Met Office said some southern waters could move into Category 4, classed as extreme and rarely recorded around the UK.

The warmth is also reaching below the surface in tidally mixed places such as the Irish Sea, English Channel and southern North Sea. Temperatures around 2°C above normal have been measured at depth there, which means animals and habitats cannot necessarily escape the heat by moving a little lower in the water.

This is happening against an exceptionally warm global background. Copernicus calculated that the average sea surface temperature across the ocean between 60 degrees south and 60 degrees north reached 20.86°C in June, the highest June value in its dataset. The previous record, set in 2024, was only 0.01°C lower.

A photograph of one lobster pot cannot tell us what is happening to every lobster population around Britain. Fisher’s reports are not a national stock assessment, and researchers are still working out how temperature, winds, breeding and food availability combined to produce the bloom.

Waves up to 300 metres high are breaking inside the ocean. Scientists are still working out how to represent what follows.

A wave does not have to reach the surface to be enormous.

Deep in the South Pacific, cold water formed around Antarctica flows north through the Samoan Passage, a narrow route between underwater ridges. Instruments lowered into the passage have recorded internal waves between 200 and 300 metres high. They move inside the ocean, along the boundaries between layers of water with different densities, so a ship directly above may see almost nothing.

When one of these waves breaks, it creates turbulence. Large swirls of water break into smaller swirls, which break down again until the movement is small enough for heat, salt, oxygen, carbon and nutrients to mix between layers.

A Perspective published in Nature Communications this week looks at how these tiny movements influence the much larger ocean and, through it, the climate. A Perspective is a paper in which researchers bring together and interpret existing evidence. It is not a new experiment, and the waves in the Samoan Passage were measured during earlier expeditions.

The central problem is scale. The turbulence discussed in the paper can occur across distances ranging from a millimetre to around 100 metres. A global climate model divides the ocean into boxes that are far larger. Even the most powerful computer cannot calculate every breaking wave and swirl across the planet.

Scientists deal with this by using a simplified mathematical rule for the combined effect of all the movement taking place inside each box. This is called parameterisation. It is similar to representing the effect of millions of leaves in a weather model without calculating the movement of every leaf.

Turbulence is patchy and can become especially intense near rough seabeds, narrow passages and the edges of ocean basins. Those are expensive and technically difficult places to measure. A short burst of strong mixing can also matter more than a long period of quiet water, which makes occasional observations easy to misread.

Researchers can sometimes estimate turbulence indirectly from changes in temperature, salt and the speed of the water. The new paper says these estimates have been useful for finding areas of strong mixing, although they can be wrong by as much as an order of magnitude. In plain English, one estimate may be around ten times higher or lower than another.

This matters because mixing helps decide where heat, carbon, oxygen and nutrients end up. It contributes to the slow circulation of deep water around the planet, while also changing the supply of nutrients and the storage of carbon over periods shorter than a year.

The paper does not produce a corrected climate forecast or show that current climate models are useless. Its authors identify a part of the ocean that scientists know matters, can observe in detail at selected sites, and still struggle to represent consistently across the whole planet.

Their answer is more direct measurement, especially close to rough seabeds and ocean boundaries, combined with better rules inside the models.

Quick Hits

A four person underwater habitat has reached the seabed in Florida, although its first crew has not moved in. DEEP installed Vanguard at Tennessee Reef in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary on 30 June. The complete system sits in water 17 metres deep, and its living section is designed to support four people for five days or longer. The company says future missions could include coral restoration, reef monitoring and climate research.

Every night, a vast layer of ocean life rises towards the surface and sinks again before dawn. Many fish, squid, crustaceans and tiny drifting animals spend daylight hours hundreds of metres down, where the darkness offers some protection from predators. After sunset, many travel upwards to feed before returning to deeper water. Sonar once made this mass of animals look like a false seabed that moved each night. Scientists call the journey diel vertical migration, meaning a movement that follows the daily cycle of light and darkness.

More than half of the molluscs found only around deep sea hydrothermal vents are now considered at risk of extinction. An IUCN Red List assessment published on Thursday classified 125 of 201 known vent mollusc species as threatened. These snails, limpets, mussels, clams and chitons live around cracks in the seabed where hot, mineral rich water escapes from below the Earth’s crust. IUCN identifies mineral exploration and the possibility of future commercial mining as major threats. No commercial deep sea mining is currently taking place in international waters, and the International Seabed Authority has approved exploration contracts only. More than 30 vent mollusc species living in areas closed to mining were assessed as Least Concern.

Hard Truth From The Sea

We have finally agreed on a way to protect the high seas, and scientists are still trying to understand everything happening inside them. The ocean is not going to wait for the rules or the models to catch up. A fisher in Devon can already see the change when his pot comes back with two octopuses and the remains of a lobster.

Paid subscribers fund the reporting that follows what governments do after the announcement, when the difficult work begins. If you want to support my work, please do consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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On 30 May 2026, on the dunes near the village of Zvërnec, a man was dragged across the sand by private security guards in black shirts. He had been protesting a fence, barbed wire strung across a public beach inside a protected landscape. A video of it went out across Albanian social media that night, and within days, tens of thousands of people were in the streets of the capital, Tirana, demanding that the government stop.

They were not, mostly, conservationists. They were students, families, and people who had never marched for a wetland in their lives. What had moved them was not the lagoon’s bird count or its place on the Adriatic Flyway. It was simpler and older than that. A piece of coast that belonged to everyone was being fenced off for a resort, and a state-owned island that had been sealed military ground for half a century had been handed to a foreign developer, and nobody had asked them.

The Stakes

The Vjosa-Narta Protected Landscape sits where the Vjosa, one of the last wild rivers in Europe, spreads into a mosaic of lagoon, salt marsh and coastal forest before reaching the Adriatic. Of the 258 river deltas that drain into the Mediterranean, an assessment published in 2024 found that only about four per cent remain relatively undisturbed. This is the largest and most biodiverse of them. More than two thousand three hundred species have been documented across it. The Narta Lagoon alone holds more than twenty thousand wintering waterbirds and ranks among the most important wetlands on the Adriatic Flyway, the corridor along which millions of birds move between Africa and Europe each year.

It is Albania’s only flamingo breeding ground. It shelters Dalmatian pelicans, among the rarest large waterbirds in the world. Its dunes are designated natural monuments under Albanian law. Loggerhead turtles, newly arrived on this coast as the sea warms, have begun to nest on its beaches. The waters off the island of Sazan, at the mouth of the bay, hold meadows of seagrass and some of the last refuges in Albania for the Mediterranean monk seal, a species down to fewer than a thousand individuals on the planet.

All of this had been protected, on paper, since 2004.

The Positioning

Most of what has been reported about this coast has been reported as a celebrity story: the Kushner name, the Trump name, the glamour of a billion-euro resort. That framing is not wrong, and the reporting behind it, by the Financial Times and others, has been serious. What it tends to skip is the mechanism. Powerful people always want beautiful places. The question is how every institution built to say no, the protected-area law, the Constitutional Court, the environmental-assessment regime, the public-tender system, came to say yes, or to say nothing, at exactly the moment it mattered.

That sequence is documented in the public record: the laws and the Council of Ministers decisions, the Constitutional Court’s ruling of 31 July 2025, the strategic-investor grant of 30 December 2024, the on-record confirmation of the anti-corruption prosecutor, and the published positions of the European Parliament, the IUCN and the conservation organisations monitoring the site.

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