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.

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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.

Read more

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.

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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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Somewhere off the Bahamas, or in a cool current near Vanuatu, there is a patch of reef that holds its colour while the coral around it bleaches white. For years, finding those pockets was mostly luck. A team of scientists has now gone looking for them on purpose and found more than they expected.

This is the good news edition, the one we run when the weeks have been heavy and the ocean has still managed to hand us something hopeful. Three deep dives. The reefs that are hanging on and the people mapping them, a first global reckoning of how much power the sea could give us, and a corner of Scotland working out how to plan for a warmer ocean without leaving its fishermen behind. Two quick hits and a hard truth to close.

Deep Dives

Scientists have mapped the coral reefs most likely to survive global warming. There are more of them than expected, and they are not where you might think.

The reef that keeps its colour is called a refugium, a place where conditions stay just kind enough for coral to survive a warming that kills its neighbours. Cool currents, some shade from the strongest sunlight, a position off the usual cyclone track. Find enough of these and you have a map of where reefs might still be alive in fifty years.

That map is roughly what a team led by the Wildlife Conservation Society has now produced. They fed 42 environmental factors and nearly 38,000 human observations of coral, gathered over 65 years, into a machine-learning model, and asked it to find the pockets where reefs are most likely to hold on. It builds on a 2018 assessment called 50 Reefs, at far higher resolution. The work identifies refugia across 72 countries and sorts them into three kinds: places that avoid the worst heat, places whose corals can withstand it, and places that bounce back fastest after bleaching.

The findings were presented in mid-June at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, and are still going through peer review at the journal Environmental Research Letters, so treat the fine detail as provisional. The direction is what matters. Conservation money is finite, and a map like this tells governments and funders where protection has the best chance of lasting.

There is a person behind the caution as much as the hope. David Obura, one of the world’s most respected coral scientists, has spent his career in Mombasa watching reefs bleach. Every tenth of a degree of warming, he says, drives reefs “to the limit”. The refugia are not safe havens, only less exposed ones, and that buys time rather than guaranteeing survival. Warm the ocean far enough and even the shelters give way.

The pockets are not spread evenly. More than half sit in five countries: the Bahamas, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Others gather around small islands, in Vanuatu, American Samoa, Christmas Island and the Chagos Archipelago. That unevenness makes protecting the world’s most resilient reefs a diplomatic problem as much as an ecological one, spread across dozens of countries with very different means.

The hope here is narrow and real. For the first time at this resolution, the people who might save these reefs know where to begin.

A first global assessment says wave and tidal energy could supply a tenth of the world’s electricity. The catch is how little of it exists yet.

In the Pentland Firth, the strait between the Scottish mainland and Orkney, the tide runs hard enough to turn turbines the size of buildings. MeyGen, the tidal array anchored there, is the largest of its kind in the world, and over its life it has produced more than 80 gigawatt hours of electricity. That is a real, working number, and a tiny one against what a new report says the ocean could give us.

Launched on 29 June, Ocean Energy: The Largest Untapped Renewable Resource is described by its authors as the first global assessment of wave and tidal energy. It pulls together more than 70 government and academic studies, with contributions from the International Renewable Energy Agency and the European Commission, and concludes that ocean energy could in principle supply 13 percent of global electricity demand. That is more than all the world’s nuclear plants produce today. In Europe the figure is 21 percent, and the UK, which holds the best wave and tidal resources on the continent, is named the sector’s European ‘El Dorado’. Rémi Gruet, who runs the trade body behind the report, calls it proof that ocean energy “is not a niche technology”.

Two things temper the number. The report was published by Ocean Energy Europe, the industry’s own trade body, so its enthusiasm is not neutral. The 13 percent is also technical potential, the energy physically there to be captured, rather than a forecast of what will be built. IRENA’s own contributor put the caveat plainly, calling for better data and shared methods before too much weight is placed on any single figure.

The distance between potential and reality is the whole story here. Ocean energy supplies a rounding error of the world’s power today. The tidal electricity that does reach the UK grid is still expensive, secured at strike prices well above offshore wind. Turning a good resource map into cheap, reliable power is a long, unglamorous job of engineering and cost reduction.

The hopeful part is that the map now exists. For the first time, a government weighing whether to back wave or tidal power can see what its own waters hold, country by country. The report credits the UK’s ringfenced tidal funding, in place since 2022, with getting turbines into the water that would not otherwise be there. The resource was always out there. Knowing its size, and where it sits, is what turns it from a slogan into a plan.

In Orkney, scientists and fishermen spent two years planning for a warmer ocean together. The result is a template other coasts can use.

In the waters east of Orkney there are grounds that matter for sharks, skates and rays, species that are both a conservation priority and, for some, a commercial catch. Deciding how to protect them without shutting down the boats that work the same water is exactly the kind of problem that usually ends in a standoff.

A project called MSPACE spent two years trying to solve it in one place. Researchers from Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the universities of Essex, York and Heriot-Watt worked alongside the marine planners at Orkney Islands Council. First they built the most detailed picture yet of how climate change will reshape Orkney’s waters, its habitats, its fishing grounds and the communities that live off them. Then they sat down with the people who actually make the decisions and worked out what to do about it.

Professor Ana Queirós, who led the project, does not oversell it. The picture, she says, is sobering, with climate hotspots putting species and habitats at risk in the near term even if the world meets its current Paris commitments. Her point is that this is happening to a country usually thought of as sheltered, and that sitting still is not an option.

What came out of it is practical. The team mapped refugia worth protecting for sharks, skates and rays, identified seabed habitats worth safeguarding for both nature and fishing, and recommended shielding the North-West Orkney marine protected area from activities that disturb the seabed and release the carbon stored in it, trawling among them. Readers who followed the argument in last week’s Deep Brief will recognise that seabed carbon point. Several of the sites worth protecting turn out to sit outside the current protected network, which the researchers flag as a limit of the system rather than a gap in the science.

The reason this counts as good news is the method as much as the map. The recommendations arrived just as Orkney adopted its new statutory marine plan, so they can feed directly into how the islands manage their waters. A way of planning that begins with the people who fish and live there, rather than arriving with the answer already written, is something other coasts can copy. That is the quiet value of a place small enough to get everyone in the room.

Quick Hits

Europe has decided that keeping watch on the ocean is infrastructure worth paying for. The European Commission’s new OceanEye initiative, welcomed this week by the World Meteorological Organization and the Global Ocean Observing System, treats ocean monitoring as critical infrastructure and puts an initial €50 million behind it through the Horizon Europe programme. The money is meant to shore up the global network of floats, buoys and instruments that feed weather forecasts, early warnings and climate models. The timing is pointed. Readers of last week’s Deep Brief will remember that public funding for ocean science is being trimmed in the US and UK, and the bodies behind this announcement note plainly that the continuity of the global observing system can no longer be taken for granted. One region deciding the ocean’s vital signs are worth funding, at exactly the moment others look away, is a small piece of good news worth marking.

A Swedish machine that harvests waves, wind and sunlight at the same time is being tested in open water off Stockholm. NoviOcean’s floating platform spent the past month at sea, validating an 850 kilowatt design that puts three renewable sources on one structure, so it can keep generating when the wind drops or the sun sets. The company, which has now logged more than 500 days of testing across Sweden, the UK and France, has signed a letter of intent to explore a project in the Azores and raised fresh private money to push toward market. Keep the excitement measured. This is a prototype, full commercial deployment is still years off, and the electricity is dearer than wind or solar for now. What it represents is the slow, patient half of the energy story from the second deep dive, the actual machines being coaxed toward working at scale.

Hard Truth From The Sea

None of this week’s good news arrived by luck. The reef map exists because scientists logged nearly 38,000 coral observations over 65 years. Orkney’s plan exists because researchers sat with its fishermen for two years, and the machine off Stockholm runs because someone spent more than 500 days testing it in cold northern water. That is what hope in the ocean actually looks like, and it is being built by people who simply kept turning up.

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See you next week.

- Luke

Every year, thousands of projects are nominated for The Earthshot Prize across five categories. One of them, Revive Our Oceans, exists to find the solutions that might repair the sea by 2030. Most nominations go no further, a handful become finalists, and one each year wins a million pounds and a global stage.

Craig Taylor is one of the people who helps decide which.

He serves as an Expert Advisor to the Prize within the Revive Our Oceans category. The role, as he describes it, is to help identify, review and assess ocean conservation solutions before they reach the people who pick the winners.

This is Ocean Heroes. Each month, I write about someone who changed what’s possible for the sea. Scientists. Lawyers. Activists. Fishers. Artists. Indigenous leaders. Some are still working. Some we’ve lost. All of them have strived to leave the ocean different than they found it.

Taylor came to the judging room, in his words, through a combination of experience and network: years working in marine ecosystems, ocean policy, stakeholder engagement and international partnerships, alongside governments, NGOs, conservation leaders, businesses and local communities. “The Earthshot Prize recognises that solving environmental challenges requires expertise from many different perspectives,” he says, “and I was honoured to be invited to contribute to that process.”

The Prize’s own page for its Expert Advisory Panel, a global group of more than 100 subject-matter experts, fills in the rest: a multi-award-winning B Corp entrepreneur with more than 30 years in conservation and environmental leadership, a long-time advocate for shark and ocean conservation, and an experienced scuba diver whose field work spans Africa and Asia.

This is a conversation about what happens inside that process: what the judges look for, what separates a finalist from a winner, and the question worth asking of any prize, which is what winning actually changes.

How a project wins

The selection runs in stages, and Taylor describes the process as exceptionally rigorous.

“Thousands of nominations are received globally through Earthshot’s network of nominators,” he says. “Those nominations are then assessed through multiple stages involving subject matter experts, independent reviewers and specialist advisory panels.”

Projects are not judged simply on whether they are doing good work. “They are assessed against a range of criteria including impact, innovation, evidence, scalability, feasibility and their potential to accelerate environmental progress at a global level.”

For the ocean category specifically, he says the judges want solutions that can genuinely contribute to restoring ocean health, whether through technology, policy, community-led conservation, finance, fisheries management or habitat restoration. “They are also looking for solutions that can inspire others. Earthshot is not simply recognising success. It is identifying approaches that can be replicated, scaled or adapted elsewhere.”

The record bears this out. The ocean finalists and winners since 2021 span exactly that range: Coral Vita, the coral restoration project that took the first ocean prize in 2021; Living Seawalls, the Australian finalist retrofitting marine habitat onto sea walls; Pristine Seas, the marine protected area initiative, a finalist the same year; the Queensland Indigenous Women’s Ranger Network, which won in 2022; Coast4c, a 2024 finalist working on sustainable seaweed; and the High Seas Treaty, which won in 2025.

What separates a finalist from a winner

Finalists are already exceptional, Taylor says. They have measurable impact and they are addressing problems that matter. So what tips one into winning?

“If I had to identify one distinguishing characteristic it would be transformational potential,” he says. “Winners tend to combine impact with a unique ability to accelerate change far beyond their current footprint. The judges look at whether Earthshot’s support, visibility and funding can act as a catalyst that unlocks significantly greater impact.”

The strength of the team matters, because even the best idea needs people who can deliver it. Scalability matters, but it is not decisive on its own. “Some highly localised solutions can still become winners if they provide a model that others can adopt elsewhere.”

Then he names something less obvious. Timing. “Sometimes a solution arrives at precisely the moment when the world is ready for it, and Earthshot can help propel it from a promising initiative into a global movement.”

The honest question

The High Seas Treaty won the ocean prize in 2025. The Treaty was the product of nearly two decades of diplomacy, scientific advocacy and negotiation involving thousands of people, almost none of it connected to a prize founded in 2020. So what does it mean to say Earthshot won it anything?

Taylor does not dodge it.

“There is an important distinction,” he says. “The Earthshot Prize does not claim ownership of solutions. The High Seas Treaty was the result of decades of diplomatic effort, scientific advocacy and international cooperation involving thousands of people around the world.”

What the Prize does, he says, is recognise and amplify. “By spotlighting the High Seas Treaty, it helps communicate why this achievement matters to a global audience, and why implementation now becomes the critical next step. In many ways, Earthshot acts as an accelerator rather than an inventor. It identifies initiatives that are already creating change and helps them achieve greater impact, visibility and momentum.”

That is a clearer account than most prizes offer of themselves. It is also the right frame for reading every impact claim attached to the Prize. When Earthshot points to its 2021 finalist Pristine Seas having helped establish thirty of the largest marine protected areas in the world, covering 6.9 million square kilometres, that is, by Earthshot’s own account, Pristine Seas’ work. The Prize’s contribution is the spotlight, the network, the platform.

Asked what the Prize itself has changed at its halfway mark, Taylor returns to two words: visibility and acceleration. “Many conservation initiatives struggle not because the solution is weak, but because they lack the funding, credibility, partnerships or global platform needed to reach the next stage,” he says. “Earthshot has become a trusted global signal that says, this solution works, and the world should pay attention. That recognition opens doors.” For the ocean specifically, he argues the Prize has helped bring marine protection, sustainable fisheries, ocean restoration and blue finance, money raised specifically for ocean and water projects, into mainstream conversations beyond the conservation sector.

It is an optimist’s case, and it is also the case a prize would naturally make for itself. The harder evidence, what measurably changed in the water because a project won rather than because the project already existed, is not yet something a five-year-old prize can fully show. Taylor’s framing does not pretend otherwise. He claims acceleration, not authorship.

The solution he thinks is underrated

Asked what ocean solution he thinks is most underestimated, Taylor names a category rather than a project.

“Community-led ocean conservation,” he says. “The conservation sector often focuses on technology, large-scale finance or international policy. While all are important, some of the most effective solutions originate from coastal communities that depend directly on healthy marine ecosystems.”

Local fishers, Indigenous peoples and coastal communities often hold generations of ecological knowledge and the strongest incentive to keep marine resources sustainable, he says. “When these communities are given the authority, tools and support to manage their marine environments, the results can be extraordinary. The future of ocean conservation will not be delivered solely by governments, scientists or NGOs. It will be delivered through genuine partnerships with the people who live alongside the ocean every day.”

The Prize’s record supports him. The 2022 ocean winner, the Queensland Indigenous Women’s Ranger Network, is exactly the kind of community-led model he describes: Indigenous women rangers protecting the Great Barrier Reef coast.

Where it should go next

Taylor wants the next five years to connect ocean conservation more directly to the things people already care about. “Too often the ocean is viewed as an environmental issue rather than critical infrastructure that supports food security, climate stability, livelihoods, tourism, trade and economic prosperity.”

He wants more visibility for Small Island Developing States, the island nations for whom ocean health is a matter of national survival, alongside Indigenous-led conservation, coastal community innovation, and financing that can unlock restoration at a meaningful scale. He also wants solutions that join things up. “Ocean conservation does not stop at the shoreline. The future lies in connecting land, freshwater, coastal habitats, communities, finance and governance into systems that work together.”

The Prize is halfway through its run. Twenty-five of its planned fifty winners have been named, five of them for the ocean, and five ceremonies are still to come.

When the next round of nominations arrives, Craig Taylor will be one of the people reading them. Most will never get near a stage or a million pounds. All of them will get a serious look from someone who has spent thirty years working out what actually works. That seems like a good person to have in the room.

Craig Taylor is an ocean conservation strategist and CEO of OPR Consulting. He serves as an Expert Advisor to The Earthshot Prize in the Revive Our Oceans category. Nominations for The Earthshot Prize are made through its official nominator network. You can connect with Craig and follow his journey on LinkedIn here.

There’s a patch of the North Atlantic, south of Greenland, that’s been getting colder for decades while almost everywhere else in the ocean warms up. This week, with more than 100 million Europeans sweating through temperatures above 35°C, scientists were pointing at that cold patch of sea as one of the reasons the heat sat on the continent so hard.

That cold blob is where we’ll start. This week I’ve got three for you. The cold blob and the heatwave it might be feeding, a billionaire putting $260 million into ocean protection just as governments pull back, and a trip off Brazil that turned up 31 new species in a fortnight. Two quick hits and a hard truth after that.

Deep Dives

A cold patch of the North Atlantic keeps bucking global warming, and scientists think it’s making Europe’s heatwaves worse.

The patch sits south of Greenland and Iceland, and it’s been a puzzle for years. While the rest of the ocean has warmed, this bit of the North Atlantic has actually cooled, by up to around 0.9°C since 1900. Scientists call it the cold blob, or the warming hole. This week, with a heat dome parked over Europe, a few of them were out explaining how a cold patch of sea can help cook a continent.

It works through the jet stream, the fast river of air that runs west to east across the Atlantic and sets a lot of Europe’s weather. Where the cold blob meets warmer water, that sharp difference in temperature changes the air above it, and it can leave the jet stream slower and wavier. A wavier jet stream is more likely to park a big high-pressure system over the continent and hold it there. Marilena Oltmanns, a physicist at the University of Bremen, describes the cold front as a kind of guide, bending the jet stream north so it loops around Europe instead of crossing it, with a heat dome settling in behind.

The evidence for all this is suggestive rather than settled, and worth being honest about. A 2016 study found that cold patches in the Atlantic were a common forerunner to Europe’s big heatwaves going back to the 1980s. A 2023 study at Germany’s GEOMAR institute ran the climate models with and without the cold blob, and got longer, fiercer heatwaves when it was in the picture. Gerard McCarthy, an oceanographer at Maynooth University in Ireland, was careful about it this week. A cold Atlantic is no “get-out-of-jail-free card” on global warming, he said, and some of the hot extremes can be made worse by the blob.

What actually causes the cold blob has been argued over for a while, and a study last month had a go at settling it. A team led by Stefan Rahmstorf at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, writing in Geophysical Research Letters, reckons the cooling comes mainly from ocean currents bringing less heat into the region, rather than heat escaping off the sea surface. That same team reads the slowdown as an early warning that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the conveyor of currents that carries warm water north and cold water south, is weakening. I’d flag the same caution we did back in Deep Brief #36. Plenty of scientists are worried about which way this is heading. The precise timing of any tipping point, though, still has no confident date, and Rahmstorf is one of the more alarmed voices on it.

If you’re in Britain or Europe living through this week, the unsettling bit is the loop. Greenland’s ice melts and pours freshwater into the North Atlantic, that helps cool the blob, the cooler blob shifts the currents and the air above them, and that seems to push European summers hotter still. Europe is warming faster than any continent on Earth, and a patch of cooling sea might be part of the reason.

Michael Bloomberg has put $260 million into ocean protection, aimed straight at the gap between what governments promise and what’s actually in the water.

Picture a stretch of ocean marked as protected on an official map. Now picture a trawler dragging its net along the seabed inside that same line, perfectly legally. That distance, between protection on paper and protection in the water, is what Bloomberg’s money is going after.

On 23 June, at the Earthshot Prize Impact Assembly during London Climate Action Week, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced the $260 million to expand its ocean work. The idea is to help close that gap between what’s been committed and what’s been done, with some of it going towards enforcing the High Seas Treaty, the UN deal that came into force in January 2026 and, for the first time, lets countries create protected areas out in international waters.

The numbers underneath are what make it urgent. Governments have a shared target, called 30x30, to protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030. The World Database on Protected Areas, which tallies up what governments report, now has coverage at around 10 percent. The Marine Protection Atlas, run by the Marine Conservation Institute, looks at how much of that is actually managed well enough to keep the destructive stuff out, and it comes to 3.3 percent. Out on the high seas, which are more than 60 percent of the ocean, barely 1 percent is protected at all.

To be fair, designating a marine protected area is a real legal step, and the reported coverage genuinely has climbed over the last decade. The trouble is that a line on a chart and a proper no-take reserve in the water get counted exactly the same in the headline figure, even though only one of them actually keeps a bottom trawl out.

The timing of his pledge is pointed. It lands just as the US and UK are trimming money for climate, nature and science, the UK while scrambling to find more for defence. The UK hasn’t walked away from the ocean, to be clear. A week earlier, at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, it put up £13.9 million in new Blue Planet Fund money, and it can point to more than £86 million for those programmes since 2021. Even so, Bloomberg’s one pledge is worth more than ten times that latest UK chunk. Over in the US, Lance Morgan, who runs the Marine Conservation Institute, reckons recent moves to allow commercial fishing in four big Pacific marine national monuments, which the administration says is about restoring access for American fishermen, could knock up to 0.7 percent off the share of fully protected ocean, if they survive the legal challenges coming at them.

A private fortune plugging a hole that public money is backing out of is a mixed thing to celebrate. The $260 million is real cash for monitoring, enforcement, and the slow, dull work of turning lines on a map into protection that holds, and it’s there partly because governments have left the room for it. The hard part is the thing the money is aimed at, which is keeping a trawler on the right side of a line once someone’s drawn it.

A two-week trip off Brazil turned up 31 new species, and let scientists watch deep-sea cells build their skeletons live on the ship.

A few hundred metres down off the coast of Brazil, a siphonophore drifts in the dark, a string of glassy clones that each do one job for what is really a single hunting animal. A laser scans it without ever touching it, building a 3D picture while it carries on swimming. The same fortnight turned up a fast-swimming gossamer worm, nine kinds of jellyfish, and a single-celled creature big enough to see with the naked eye.

In two weeks at sea, a team aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor confirmed 31 species new to science. They were working in the ocean’s midwater, the huge stretch of water between the sunlit surface and the seafloor, which is the biggest living space on the planet and one of the least explored. Most of the animals down there are soft and jelly-like, and they fall apart the moment you haul them up in a net, which is a big part of why we still know so little about them.

The speed came down to the kit. Instead of collecting animals and describing them in a lab years later, the team imaged them where they live, using laser scanners and a shadowgraph camera bolted onto a remotely operated submersible. On board, a microscope they’ve nicknamed the Squid let them watch the living cells of a single-celled organism in 3D as it built its glass skeleton, something the institute says had never been done at sea before. Sequencing the genomes on the ship itself turned identifications that usually take years into confirmations made in days.

Karen Osborn, the chief scientist, has spent her whole career on these animals and still, by her own account, feels like she’s only getting started with them. The team reckons the pace of discovery might be a record.

There’s a governance edge to this as well as the wonder. The midwater is exactly the zone that proposed deep-sea mining and midwater fishing would disturb, and it’s hard to weigh up the cost of wrecking a habitat when you haven’t even named most of what lives in it. Every fortnight like this one widens the gap between what’s actually down there and what any rulebook has got around to accounting for.

Two honest caveats. The 31 are confirmed new by the researchers, but the formal write-ups, the bit that makes a species official, still have to be published. The findings were actually announced earlier in June, reaching a bigger audience this week through the Guardian, so this is a story coming back round rather than breaking. The animals, and the sheer amount still unnamed below the surface, are real either way.

Quick Hits

Ocean people gathered in London this week to make the case that the sea belongs in the middle of climate talks, not off to one side. The session, run by the Commonwealth Secretariat and the UK government during London Climate Action Week, was really a warm-up for COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, and the Commonwealth summit in Antigua and Barbuda, both coming in November. The Commonwealth’s Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey, pointed out that 49 of the bloc’s 56 members have coastlines and 25 are large ocean states, and warned that the sea is soaking up the costs of a warming planet at a rate that can’t be sustained. One of her three priorities was turning commitments into projects you can actually invest in. The honest measure of a session like this comes later, in whether the money everyone urged in June has actually moved by the time those November summits roll around.

A study mapping where ocean plastic actually harms wildlife suggests we may be cleaning up in the wrong places. The work, published last year in Nature Sustainability by Zhang and colleagues and flagged this week by the European Commission’s science service, compared where plastic collects with where animals actually live. The big garbage patches often sit where few animals are, so they may matter less than their reputation suggests. The north-eastern Atlantic, by contrast, is a real hotspot, with animals far likelier to get tangled near coasts, more than a hundred times likelier than out in the open sea. The authors flag a catch with ‘biodegradable’ gear, which breaks into bits that are easier to swallow, and note the model measures relative risk rather than absolute. It lands while the UN’s plastics treaty stays stuck, with informal talks in Nairobi from 30 June and no agreed text after two failed deadlines.

Hard Truth From The Sea

What stays with me from this week is the heat. The ocean has quietly soaked up something like nine-tenths of the extra heat we’ve trapped, which is a big part of why a brutal week in Europe wasn’t far worse. It’s been carrying that for decades, steering our weather, holding more life than we’ve ever counted, and getting pledges and maps back in return. The sea we call ten percent protected, and actually protect about three, is the same sea keeping the rest of this summer survivable.

One more thing from me this week. My latest article for Oceanographic Magazine is up: The Flamingo Revolution, on the loggerhead turtles nesting along Albania’s protected Vjosa-Narta coast and the luxury resort development rising near them. It is the public half of a longer Ocean Rising investigation landing soon for paid subscribers.

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See you next week.

- Luke

It’s Tuesday evening, and this afternoon I had to collect my son from nursery early, because it had got too hot for him and he’d had enough of it. We came home, filled the paddling pool, and cracked open a box of ice lollies.

The hard part is still ahead. Tomorrow and Thursday, the Met Office expects at least 39°C across much of England, under a red warning, and the June record set back in 1976 is likely to fall before the week is out.

This is also the week of London Climate Action Week. Thousands of people, room after room across the city, handed over to a single question: a warming world, and what we intend to do about it. I was meant to be there on Friday. I’m no longer sure I’ll make it.

I’m not the only one. Over the past couple of days, I’ve spoken to a few people who should be in those rooms and won’t be, kept home by the very thing the week exists to fight. Their children’s schools have closed, hundreds have across the south. Nurseries have rung them, the way my son’s rang me. Rail companies are telling people not to travel on the hottest days unless they must. People who have given their working lives to this are spending this week of all weeks at home, filling paddling pools and refreshing the forecast, shut out of the conversation about the fight by the fight itself.

It’s a small thing, in the scheme of it. A few missed panels. A larger absence sits inside it. For all the attention the heat is getting this week, the maps, the records, the warnings, the thing absorbing almost all of it gets the least attention of all.

Go down to the coast over the next few days to cool off and the sea won’t have got the memo. It will be cold, properly cold, cold enough that the RNLI is warning about cold water shock, the gasp that can drown a strong swimmer in the first minute. Record heat in the air, water cold enough to be dangerous, both true on the same beach.

That cold surface fools you. While the top metre stays cool, the same still, sunlit weather that’s about to roast the land will be pouring heat into the sea beneath it. High pressure, no wind, hour after hour of sun is exactly how you cook an ocean from above. In 2023, this set-up pushed sea temperatures around the UK and Ireland to extreme levels, as much as 5°C above normal off the west of Ireland, where NOAA rated the marine heatwave beyond extreme, the top of its five-point scale. Heat that feels survivable on a beach doesn’t go anywhere. It sinks, and the sea keeps it. The ocean has taken up more than 90 percent of all the extra heat we have ever trapped. Most of global warming isn’t in the sky we keep looking at. It’s in the water we don’t.

There is life down there with a stake in all this, too. Take the white-beaked dolphin, one of ours, a stocky character with a short white beak that has worked the cool seas around Britain since the ice left, tens of thousands of them in the North Sea. It’s a cold-water specialist, which is the trouble. It avoids warm water, and as our seas have warmed, it has been backing north, edging off the bottom of its own range, while its warm-water cousin, the common dolphin, moves up into the space it leaves. Off Scotland, researchers have watched the swap since the 1980s. It can swim away from a hot summer, which is more than a kelp forest can manage, but only while there is colder water to swim to, and for the dolphins in the southern North Sea, the map eventually runs out.

The odd thing is how little we watch any of it. For human heat we have built something serious: graded warnings, alerts to every hospital and care home, schools and nurseries deciding it’s too hot for children, all of it working hard this week and rightly so. For the sea, almost none of that. It is only fair to say why. Heat kills people fast, and a system that protects them first has its head screwed on right. The sea is harder to watch, and newer to the science. The gap is startling all the same. It took a recent piece of work at the National Oceanography Centre to give us the first proper map of where marine heatwaves are likeliest in British waters. We are an island, and we drew that map about five minutes ago.

The dolphins, for their part, have been filing a report nobody commissioned. UK researchers have taken to calling cetaceans sentinels, animals whose comings and goings reveal what a warming sea is doing to the life in it, in a way no instrument can. Where the white-beaked dolphin stops turning up, the water has crossed a line it couldn’t hold. It is as clear a voice on a warming world as anything you’ll hear in London this week, and it isn’t in the room either.

This evening, my son has been sun-pink and delighted, sticky with melted ice lolly, cooled by a hose and the people who love him. The sea gets no such care, and hardly anyone is looking.

When the marine heatwave data for this week is in, Ocean Rising will publish what the sea actually did while the country watched the sky.

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The whaling vessel Hvalur 9 shot two fin whales overnight. The animals were the first hunted in Icelandic waters since 2023.

Iceland’s Minister of Industries, Hanna Katrín Friðriksson, has said in public that commercial whaling is not in the national interest, and her government has committed to legislation to end it. She has also said that nothing could be done this summer to stop Hvalur, and that a bill would be introduced when parliament returns in the autumn. Two fin whales are dead this morning in the gap between those two statements.

The license sits at the centre of that gap. In December 2024, Iceland’s interim government issued Hvalur a five-year permit covering 2025 to 2029, a decision heavily criticised by most parties in Iceland. For 2026, the Marine and Freshwater Research Institute advised a ceiling of no more than 150 fin whales and 168 minke whales to be killed.

The minister’s position has a defensible basis. A whaling license is a legal instrument, and revoking one mid-term is not the same as declining to issue it. Unilateral revocation could expose the state to compensation claims from a company that already litigates over halted seasons. Even IFAW, which opposes the hunt, has acknowledged that any change in the law may only take effect when the current licence expires. The lawful route to ending whaling may genuinely run through primary legislation, and primary legislation may genuinely have to wait for the autumn session.

What the government has not done is explain why a practice it calls indefensible remains lawful enough to kill an endangered animal this morning. At the same time, the remedy waits for a parliamentary calendar.

Fin whales are the second-largest animals on Earth, after blue whales. The IUCN Red List classifies them as vulnerable to extinction. They mature slowly and reproduce slowly, which means populations recover slowly from hunting pressure.

The method is contested on welfare grounds, by Iceland’s own regulator. A report by the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority on the 2022 season found that 41% of whales did not die immediately, took a median of 11.5 minutes to die, and in some cases survived up to two hours after being struck, findings the authority concluded were inconsistent with Iceland’s Animal Welfare Act.

The commercial case for the hunt has thinned. Japan, historically the only export market for Icelandic fin whale meat, has scaled back its purchases as its own whaling capacity has grown, and meat from the 2023 season has reportedly gone unsold. Whether any of this changes the minister’s hand is now a question for the autumn.

Iceland is one of three countries, with Norway and Japan, that still permit commercial whaling. A national referendum on restarting EU accession negotiations is scheduled for August. The European Union opposes commercial whaling. The bill to end it has not been written.

Two fin whales were killed before any of that was settled.

On Thursday, the Trump administration reversed its decision to dismantle the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $368 million deep-sea monitoring network that provides real-time data on currents, storms, oxygen levels, and ocean chemistry from instruments anchored across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans. The reversal came after a bipartisan group of ten senators demanded the National Science Foundation back down.

Two weeks ago, this newsletter covered the global network of Argo floats that tracks the state of the ocean and warned it was being allowed to decay. This week, the US nearly lost an even larger piece of that infrastructure before Congress intervened. That story opens a Deep Brief built around the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, where Fiji and Panama launched the first international initiative to protect the ocean’s twilight zone, and where the EU and UK pledged a combined half a billion euros in new funding. Meanwhile, Norway approved funding for the world’s first ship tunnel through some of the roughest coastal waters on the planet. Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.

Deep Dives

The Trump administration tried to dismantle a $368 million ocean monitoring system. It took ten senators to stop them.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a network of anchored and mobile instruments that has been measuring the deep ocean continuously since 2014. Its arrays sit in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans, collecting real-time data on temperature, salinity, oxygen, carbon dioxide, currents, and biological activity at depths that no other US system monitors. The programme cost $368 million to build, is coordinated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in collaboration with Oregon State University and the University of Washington, and costs roughly $48 million a year to operate.

In early June, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle the entire network, beginning with the removal of instruments from the Endurance Array off the Oregon and Washington coasts. The agency described the decision as part of a strategy to take a “nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies.” Scientists disagreed. The Endurance Array provides data that feeds directly into National Weather Service forecasts, Coast Guard search-and-rescue operations, and monitoring of harmful algal blooms and El Niño events that affect fisheries, agriculture, and coastal safety.

The timing was particularly alarming. An intense El Niño event, accompanied by an associated marine heatwave, is expected off the US West Coast this summer. Removing the instruments that track those conditions in the weeks before they arrive would have left forecasters working blind. Hilary Palevsky, an oceanographer at Oregon State who uses OOI data in her research, told Eos there was “a lot of real concern” among the scientific community that the Endurance Array was being dismantled just as the event it was built to monitor was arriving.

On 15 June, a bipartisan group of ten US senators, led by Democrat Jeff Merkley of Oregon, sent a letter to Brian Stone, the acting director of the NSF, demanding a reversal. “The OOI system delivers crucial information about our ocean patterns and weather, reaching and touching all Americans,” the letter read. “The effort to dismantle this vital network, jeopardizing decades of prior research, must be reversed in order to prioritize public safety.”

On Thursday, the administration backed down. The instruments will remain in the water.

The reversal is welcome, but the pattern it reveals is not. This is the third time the Trump administration has attempted to cut funding for US ocean monitoring systems. Previous budget proposals sought to eliminate the Integrated Ocean Observing System, the separate $48 million coastal monitoring network, before Congress restored its funding. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy blueprint, which has guided much of the administration’s approach to federal agencies, recommended that climate and weather research across the government “should be disbanded.”

For readers who followed Deep Brief #41’s coverage of the global ocean observation network and the pressure it faces, this story is the US chapter of the same problem. Continuous ocean monitoring is the infrastructure that weather forecasts, climate projections, and fisheries management depend on. It generates no profit. It has no constituency that lobbies for it. When budgets are cut, it is among the first things to go, and nobody notices until the next forecast goes wrong or the next marine heatwave arrives without warning.

Fiji and Panama have launched the first international push to protect the ocean’s twilight zone. It happened at the same conference where the EU pledged €338 million.

At the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa this week, Fiji and Panama launched the Mesopelagic Zone Conservation Challenge, a call to governments worldwide to take concrete action to protect the layer of ocean between 200 and 1,000 metres deep, commonly known as the twilight zone.

This layer is too deep for sunlight to support photosynthesis and too shallow to qualify as the deep sea, which has left it in a governance blind spot. It sits below the jurisdiction of most fisheries management and above the attention of most deep-sea policy. It is also, as this newsletter has covered repeatedly, one of the most ecologically important parts of the ocean.

Every night, billions of tonnes of small animals rise from the twilight zone toward the surface to feed, then descend again before dawn, carrying carbon with them. This daily vertical migration is the largest synchronised movement of biomass on the planet and a significant driver of the ocean’s capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. The creatures that live in this zone, lanternfish, squid, krill, and bristlemouths among them, are the primary food source for commercially valuable species above them. Off the Kenyan coast, where hundreds of local fishermen depend on tuna and swordfish for their livelihoods, Ocean Conservancy analysis released alongside the Mombasa announcement found that mesopelagic species make up as much as 81 per cent of swordfish diets and 46 per cent of yellowfin tuna diets. Kenya’s tuna and swordfish industry reported earnings of $3.3 million in 2023. The twilight zone is where those fishermen’s catch finds its food.

The initiative, led by Ocean Conservancy alongside the Marine Conservation Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, asks countries to take four steps: commit to protecting the mesopelagic zone in national waters, support inclusion of mesopelagic protections in the UN General Assembly Sustainable Fisheries Resolution, invest in research to fill the enormous knowledge gaps, and adopt precautionary management before industrial exploitation begins.

That last point is urgent. With improving technology and rising demand for fish protein, industries are already exploring ways to harvest twilight zone animals for fish oil, pet food, and aquaculture feed. Norway, the world’s largest krill fishing nation, has been at the forefront of mesopelagic fisheries research, and several companies are developing technologies to catch species that have never been commercially fished.

“The twilight zone serves as a gateway between the ocean’s surface and the deep sea,” said Chris Dorsett, Vice President of Conservation at Ocean Conservancy. “Under threat from climate change, growing commercial interests, and other activities, this ocean layer urgently deserves a spotlight.”

In addition to Fiji and Panama formally joining, Portugal and Vanuatu expressed support for the challenge’s goals. Whether other major fishing nations follow will determine whether this initiative becomes meaningful policy or remains a conference announcement.

Norway is about to build the world’s first ship tunnel. It will carry vessels through a kilometre and a half of solid rock to avoid one of the most dangerous stretches of water in Europe.

The Stadhavet Sea, off the western coast of Norway, is one of the roughest patches of water on the planet. Storms sweep across it roughly 100 days a year. Waves arriving from multiple directions simultaneously can reach up to 30 metres. The Stadlandet Peninsula forces every vessel travelling the Norwegian coastal route, fishing boats, cargo ships, salmon-farm transports, ferries, and cruise ships, out around an exposed headland where the conditions can change in minutes.

For decades, the solution has been to wait. Vessels anchor and sit out the weather, sometimes for days at a time, delaying perishable seafood shipments and putting pressure on Norway’s rail network as the only alternative. Tore O. Sandvik, county mayor in Trøndelag, put the cost simply: salmon exported from his region to the continent cannot be left stuck at Stad in bad weather if it is meant to arrive fresh. The delays cost money. The route costs lives. Since the end of the Second World War, 33 people have died in maritime accidents in the Stadhavet Sea. The problem is old enough that Vikings used to drag their longships over the Dragseidet isthmus, a narrow pass across the peninsula, rather than risk the open water.

Norway’s answer is to go through the rock instead of around it. The Stad Ship Tunnel will run for 1.7 kilometres through the narrowest part of the peninsula, connecting the Moldefjord on one side with the Vanylvsfjord on the other. It will be 50 metres tall and 36 metres wide, large enough to accommodate the Hurtigruten coastal ferries and cruise ships. The estimated cost is NOK 8.6 billion, roughly $900 million.

The project has been discussed for decades and has lurched between approval and cancellation multiple times. In October 2025, Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told Norwegian broadcaster NRK that the tunnel was simply too expensive. Supporters refused to give up. By early 2026, the Norwegian Coastal Administration had worked with three contractor groups to reduce costs. On 7 June, initial funding of NOK 150 million, roughly $16 million, was included in the revised national budget after a deal between Norway’s centre-left parties. Final parliamentary approval was expected by 19 June. Construction is planned to begin in early 2027, with a build time of approximately five years.

The engineering is remarkable. Workers will blast and excavate roughly eight million tonnes of rock to create the passage. The tunnel will include lead-in structures built out into the water on both sides to guide ships safely through the portal. Traffic will be one-directional, managed by a control system similar to those used in road tunnels.

“We are ready to initiate the processes needed to facilitate a construction start in the beginning of 2027,” said Kystverket Director General Einar Vik Arset.

There is no precedent for this anywhere in the world. Canal tunnels exist. Road tunnels under water exist. A tunnel carved through coastal rock specifically to allow ships to avoid a dangerous stretch of open sea does not. If completed, the Stad Ship Tunnel will be a piece of maritime infrastructure unlike anything else on the planet, built for the simplest of reasons: the sea outside is too rough, and people keep dying.

Quick Hits

The European Union has pledged €338.35 million for ocean conservation, sustainable fisheries, and maritime security at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa. Commissioner for fisheries and oceans Costas Kadis made the announcement on 17 June at the 11th Our Ocean Conference, the first to be held on African soil. The funding covers marine protected areas, pollution reduction, climate adaptation, deep-sea biodiversity research, and fisheries enforcement. The EU’s cumulative Our Ocean pledges now run into the billions, though tracking how much of previous commitments has been disbursed and implemented remains a challenge for watchdog organisations.

The UK has committed £13.9 million to ocean communities through the Blue Planet Fund, bringing total UK investment to over £86 million since 2021. Marine Minister Emma Hardy announced the funding at the same Mombasa conference, directing it through three programmes: PROBLUE, the World Bank’s blue economy trust fund (£6.7 million), the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (£2.2 million), and the Global Plastic Action Partnership (£5 million). The money is going to specific projects: in São Tomé and Príncipe, PROBLUE funding is reducing flood risk for more than 800 households. In Vanga Bay, Kenya, ORRAA is developing one of the world’s first marine biodiversity credit schemes in the global south.

A mysterious sound detected near the Mariana Trench in 2014 took eight years to identify. It was a whale. In October 2014, autonomous underwater gliders operated by researchers at Oregon State University recorded an unusual noise in the deep western Pacific: a low, sonorous grunt followed by a squeaky, metallic echo that sounded more like a machine than an animal. Dubbed the Western Pacific Biotwang, the sound puzzled scientists because it did not match any known whale call and was detected year-round rather than only during breeding season. In 2024, a team finally confirmed the source: Bryde’s whales, a species of baleen whale found across tropical and warm temperate oceans. The story, resurfacing this week through Popular Mechanics, is a reminder that the ocean still produces sounds that take the better part of a decade to explain.

Hard Truth From The Sea

This week, the world’s governments gathered in Mombasa and pledged hundreds of millions of euros for ocean conservation. In Washington, it took ten senators and a public outcry to stop the same government from destroying $368 million worth of ocean instruments that were already in the water and already working. Fiji and Panama asked countries to protect a layer of ocean that most people have never heard of and that industries are already preparing to exploit. Norway committed nearly a billion dollars to tunnel through a mountain because the sea on the other side keeps killing people. Somewhere off the Kenyan coast, a fisherman is pulling in swordfish whose diet is 81 per cent twilight zone. He was not in the room in Mombasa when the pledge was made. Whether his livelihood survives the decade depends on decisions made by people who were.

Paid subscribers fund the reporting that tracks what is changing in the ocean and why. If you want accountability journalism on the systems we depend on and the institutions responsible for protecting them, please condisr upgarding to a paid subscription.

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See you next week.

- Luke

Last week, this newsletter covered a study that found the deep basins of the central Arctic Ocean almost empty of fish. Echo sounders returned near-silence. Trawl nets came up with almost nothing. The researchers called it a biological desert beneath the ice.

This week, a separate team has published a study that may explain why. Twenty years of data from the Fram Strait, the narrow passage between Svalbard and Greenland, where Arctic water drains into the North Atlantic, show that the chemical foundations of the Arctic food chain crossed a tipping point around 2009, and the researchers say it is unlikely to reverse.

That story leads a Deep Brief that also covers the discovery of more than 1,100 previously unknown marine species in a single year, and the first direct evidence that floating solar farms on the ocean generate significantly more electricity than solar panels on land. Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.

Deep Dives

The Arctic Ocean has crossed a chemical tipping point.

The Arctic food chain depends on nitrate, a dissolved form of nitrogen that phytoplankton, the microscopic algae at the base of the food web, need to grow. Without nitrate, phytoplankton cannot photosynthesise in sufficient quantities to feed the zooplankton, fish, seabirds, and marine mammals above them. Nitrate in the Arctic is the fertiliser that makes everything else possible.

A study published this week in Communications Earth & Environment by an international team led by Professor Raja Ganeshram, at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, has found that nitrate concentrations in Arctic surface waters dropped sharply around 2009 and have not recovered. The shift, they argue, represents a regime change: the Arctic Ocean has moved from a system limited primarily by light, where the ice cover prevented photosynthesis by blocking sunlight, to a system limited by nutrients, where the ice has retreated, but the nitrate needed to fuel growth is being destroyed faster than it can be replenished.

The mechanism is a process called benthic denitrification. When sea ice retreats, sunlight reaches the shallow continental shelves that underlie nearly half of the Arctic Ocean. More light means more photosynthesis, which means more organic matter sinking to the seafloor. Microbes in the sediment consume that organic matter and, under the low-oxygen conditions that result, convert nitrate into nitrogen gas. Nitrogen gas is useless to most marine plankton. It escapes into the atmosphere and is, from the food web’s perspective, permanently lost.

The team analysed 20 years of oceanographic data collected from the Fram Strait, where polar surface water flows out of the Arctic and into the North Atlantic. They tracked nitrate concentrations and the ratio of silicon to nitrogen in those outflowing waters. After 2009, fixed nitrogen concentrations fell sharply while silicon-to-nitrogen ratios rose, a signature consistent with accelerated denitrification on the shelves. Combining these observations with modelled denitrification rates and tracking the paths that water takes across the Arctic shelves, the researchers identified the Chukchi Sea and the East Siberian shelf as the primary zones of nitrogen loss, removing approximately 12 teragrams of nitrogen annually, enough to offset a substantial portion of the nutrients entering the Arctic from the Pacific Ocean through the Bering Strait.

“The changes we report suggest that the Arctic Ocean ecosystem passed a tipping point around 2009,” Ganeshram said. “Once the sea-ice melts and the balance between nutrient supply and removal shifts, the original conditions can’t recover, even if ice were somehow restored.”

The consequences flow upward through the food chain. With less nitrate available, the Arctic may shift toward supporting smaller, less nutritious species of plankton. These smaller organisms transfer less energy to the fish, birds, and mammals that depend on them. The study also raises concerns about the Arctic’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide: phytoplankton pull CO2 from the atmosphere during photosynthesis, and fewer phytoplankton means less carbon drawn down.

For readers who followed last week’s Deep Brief, this study completes a picture. The empty Arctic basins documented by the Norwegian Polar Institute were biologically vacant. The Edinburgh team’s work suggests that the chemical conditions needed to support life in those waters are actively deteriorating. The emptiness is not a baseline waiting to be filled as the ice retreats. It is a consequence of the retreat itself.

Scientists have identified more than 1,100 previously unknown marine species in a single year.

Ocean Census, a global initiative led by Japan’s Nippon Foundation and the UK-based ocean exploration institute Nekton, announced on 19 May that 1,121 previously unknown marine species were identified across 13 expeditions and 9 species discovery workshops in 2025. The figure represents a 54 per cent increase over the 728 new species recorded the previous year and involves more than 1,000 researchers working across 85 countries.

The discoveries came from depths as great as 6,575 metres and from some of the planet’s least explored marine environments. Among the species announced: a chimaera, commonly called a ghost shark, found at roughly 800 metres in the Coral Sea Marine Park off Queensland, Australia. Chimaeras are ancient cartilaginous fish that diverged from a common ancestor with sharks and rays nearly 400 million years ago, predating the dinosaurs. Their smooth, scaleless skin and reflective eyes give them an appearance that earned them their common name.

Near the South Sandwich Islands in the south Atlantic, at nearly 3,600 metres depth, researchers found a carnivorous sponge belonging to the genus Chondrocladia. Unlike typical sponges, which filter food passively from the water, this species traps small crustaceans using microscopic hooks on its surface, earning it the nickname “death ball” among the team that found it.

On volcanic seamounts in Japan, scientists discovered a bristle worm living inside the translucent chambers of a glass sponge, a structure built from crystalline silica, the same material used to make glass. The worm and the sponge share a symbiotic relationship: the worm gets shelter, and the sponge likely benefits from the worm’s feeding activity. In Timor-Leste, a ribbon worm just an inch long, marked by stripes of bright orange that signal chemical defences, was found in shallow water. The toxins that ribbon worms produce have been investigated as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

“We spend billions searching for life on Mars or going to the dark side of the moon,” said Oliver Steeds, director of Ocean Census. “Discovering the majority of life on our own planet, in our own ocean, costs a fraction of that.”

The initiative is accelerating identification by recognising “discovered” as a formal scientific status that can be logged immediately into an open-access database once validated by an expert, before the longer formal description process is complete. This matters because many species may vanish before they are formally described, due to climate change, industrial pollution, and the growing prospect of deep-sea mining in regions where species have barely been catalogued.

Ocean Census has planned six new expeditions and five species discovery workshops for 2026.

Floating solar farms on the ocean generate 12 per cent more electricity than solar panels on land.

Researchers at Taiwan’s National Taipei University of Technology have published the first direct comparison between an offshore floating solar installation and a conventional land-based solar farm operating under similar conditions. The floating system generated roughly 12 per cent more electricity over its operational lifetime, according to the study, published on 19 May in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.

The reason is temperature. Solar panels lose efficiency as they heat up. Panels mounted on land absorb heat from the ground and surrounding air. Panels floating on the ocean are cooled by the water beneath them and by stronger winds across the open surface. The temperature difference, typically two to three degrees Celsius lower at sea, is enough to produce a measurable gain in output.

The comparison was unusually clean. Taiwan Power Company had installed a 100-megawatt land-based solar farm in the Changbin Industrial Park. Nearby, Chenya Energy had deployed a 181-megawatt offshore floating photovoltaic system on 1.8 square kilometres of sheltered water within the same industrial zone. The proximity and similar conditions allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of the water surface on performance.

“What we found is that offshore floating solar systems can generate more electricity over their lifetime, about 12 per cent more than land-based systems under the same conditions,” said Ching-Feng Chen, one of the study’s authors. “Because of this higher energy output, they also achieve greater carbon emission reductions.”

Taiwan, roughly the size of the Netherlands, faces acute land constraints for renewable energy. Its energy sector accounts for more than half of national carbon emissions, and the island is currently 99 per cent dependent on imported natural gas, a vulnerability intensified by the ongoing disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Offshore floating solar offers a pathway that does not compete with agriculture, does not require clearing land, and sits within reach of existing coastal grid infrastructure.

More than 1,100 floating solar installations now exist globally, predominantly on reservoirs and lakes in China and other densely populated Asian countries. The Taiwan study is significant because it compares offshore ocean deployment rather than freshwater, where conditions are calmer, less corrosive, and easier to maintain. Whether floating solar can withstand typhoons, salt corrosion, and biofouling over a 25-year operational life at sea remains the open engineering question. The 12 per cent advantage means nothing if the panels do not survive.

Quick Hits

In a fishing village on the coast of Mozambique, former seahorse poachers are now seahorse protectors. Fishermen in Mangalisse were being paid between 25 and 50 Mozambican meticais, roughly 30 to 60 pence, per dried seahorse by traffickers linked to the traditional Chinese medicine trade. The animals, which fishermen began calling “diamonds,” were being pulled from seagrass beds by the thousand. A community-led conservation initiative, supported by local lodge owner Mike van Hone and marine scientist Ilídio Cole, has turned the dynamic around: former collectors now guide research teams and patrol the seagrass beds. Globally, despite CITES Appendix II listing since 2002, the seahorse trade has shifted to a black market. Research from Project Seahorse at the University of British Columbia found that 95 per cent of dried seahorses in Hong Kong’s large market were being imported from countries that had export bans in place. Three seahorse species, giraffe, common, and thorny, are found in Mozambican waters.

India and Africa are being urged to deepen ocean cooperation across fisheries, renewable energy, and maritime security. A policy analysis by India’s Observer Research Foundation argues that combining India’s technical and industrial capacity with Africa’s marine resources and growing institutional frameworks could accelerate sustainable ocean development in both regions. The piece highlights Blue Bonds, joint action against illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, and shared investment in ocean renewable energy as priority areas. For a newsletter that covers ocean governance, the India-Africa maritime relationship is worth watching: together, the two regions control a substantial share of the Indian Ocean coastline and its fisheries.

This week’s Arctic tipping point study and last week’s empty Arctic basins study were published independently, a week apart, by different research teams. The Norwegian Polar Institute found almost no fish in the deep central Arctic. The University of Edinburgh found that the nutrient base those fish would need to survive is being chemically destroyed. Neither team cites the other. Together, they describe an ocean that is simultaneously losing its animals and the chemical conditions needed to support them. Readers who want both studies: the empty basins paper is in Communications Earth & Environment (Hop et al., 22 May 2026). The nitrate tipping point paper is in the same journal (Ganeshram et al., 28 May 2026).

Hard Truth From The Sea

In a single week, two independent studies described an Arctic Ocean that is losing both its life and the chemistry needed to sustain it. In another part of the ocean, scientists catalogued more than a thousand species nobody knew existed, many of them in waters that may not look the same in a decade. In Taiwan, engineers proved that the surface of the ocean can generate more clean energy than the land beside it. The ocean contains both the crisis and the means to address it. Which of them defines the next decade depends on decisions that have not yet been made.

Paid subscribers fund the reporting that tracks what is changing in the ocean and why. If you want accountability journalism on the systems we depend on and the institutions responsible for protecting them, please support me and upgrade to a paid subscription.

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See you next week.

- Luke

In early March, I was added to a WhatsApp group of 300 scientists, journalists, and campaigners trying to work out what was killing the ocean in Papua New Guinea. I watched. I waited. I wanted to know what the government actually found, not what the campaign said they found. I got hold of the report. What it contains is not what the PNG government's public statements suggested. And when I put it to the palm oil corporation identified as a potential contributor, their answers raised more questions than they resolved.

On 11 December 2025, fish began dying in Larairu Lagoon, Kafkaf Village, on the east coast of New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea. Within weeks, the die-offs had spread north along the Boluminski Highway coast. Community monitors documented 3,451 dead marine organisms across more than 15 species. Hundreds of residents reported skin burns and respiratory symptoms after contact with seawater. Families stopped fishing. Children stopped swimming.

Five months later, no government agency has confirmed what caused it.

The Guardian reported on the ongoing crisis this month. AFP, Mongabay, and Inside Climate News have covered the community dimension since March. What drew me was not that story. Other outlets were already covering it. It was a governance question nobody was pursuing: what did the PNG government actually find when it investigated, what does it admit it cannot determine, and what has it not yet done?

Ocean Rising has reviewed a preliminary report produced by the Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA) in April 2026, covering field investigations conducted in February. The findings are more troubling than the government’s public statements have suggested. Not a confirmed cause, but a clear picture of how far the investigation has to go.

What CEPA Found

The report was prepared by a small technical team that travelled to New Ireland, collected samples under difficult conditions, and produced an assessment they knew was insufficient before they filed it. That is not an indictment of the individuals involved. It is an indictment of what they were resourced to do.

The preliminary report documents clear environmental stress across multiple sites along the East Coast. Freshwater systems showed extreme turbidity, dangerously low dissolved oxygen, and nutrient levels far above acceptable thresholds. At Ladaim Creek, biological oxygen demand was recorded at 342 mg/L against a standard of 5 mg/L, indicating severe organic pollution and oxygen depletion. Ammonia levels at the same site exceeded safe limits by a factor of more than twenty. These findings are consistent with significant nutrient enrichment from land-based sources.

The ocean itself told a more complicated story. At Banatalis, near Kafkaf Village, seawater samples came back unusually acidic. Further along the coast, at sites near Laxunaru, the opposite was true: water so alkaline it was outside the normal range for any healthy marine environment. The explanation for that anomaly was natural gas vents in the reef system, which were documented and sampled by the investigation team. Seawater, in other words, was being chemically altered from below as well as from above. The report identifies a combination of factors: nutrient pollution from land, abnormal water chemistry from the vents, and possible bacterial contamination.

Fish tissue results, tested against Codex Alimentarius and US FDA standards, showed mercury and lead below detection limits across all nine samples. The report states clearly that heavy metal accumulation in fish tissue does not support heavy metals as the primary cause of the fish kills. For those who have been following the story, this significantly weakens the industrial mining contamination hypothesis that circulated from March.

The most likely explanation, according to CEPA’s own assessment, is a multi-stressor event driven primarily by degraded water quality: sediment loading, organic pollution, low dissolved oxygen, and possible vent-associated contamination, all exacerbated by exceptionally heavy rainfall in December 2025 and February 2026.

Oil palm agricultural runoff is specifically identified as a potential contributing factor. Poliamba Limited, the major oil palm operator in northern New Ireland, owns and manages estates along both the eastern and western coasts of the province. The operation was acquired by SD Guthrie Berhad, formerly Sime Darby Plantation, in 2015. What that means in practice, and what a separate university analysis found about the potential pathways between those plantations and the affected coastline, is examined below.

While the government’s investigation has stalled, community monitoring has continued. Independent scientists working with Ailan Awareness, the local marine conservation organisation that has led documentation efforts since December, conducted a further round of pH sampling across thirteen ocean sites in late April. Their readings, all below pH 9, raised questions about the reliability of some early government data, which had recorded alkalinity levels of pH 12 to 13. The community, in other words, is still doing science that the state has not completed.

What follows is the finding that no other outlet has reported, and the written record of a corporation that was asked specific questions and chose not to answer them.

Read more

On the journey from Svalbard toward the North Pole, the research vessel Kronprins Haakon carried echo sounders and trawl nets designed to detect and collect fish. The instruments scanned the water column from the surface to 500 metres below. The trawls were lowered repeatedly through the Nansen Basin and the Amundsen Basin, the vast, ice-covered waters of the central Arctic Ocean. The scientists expected to find at least some fish. They found almost none.

That study, published this week in Communications Earth & Environment, opens a Deep Brief that also covers the quiet disintegration of social life on coral reefs under ocean acidification, and a warning that the global network of instruments tracking what is happening in the ocean is being allowed to decay at the moment its data is needed most. Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.

Deep Dives

Researchers sailed from Svalbard toward the North Pole searching for fish. They found an ocean that was almost completely empty.

In the late summers of 2022 and 2023, scientists from the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Fram Centre in Tromsø took the research vessel Kronprins Haakon on two expeditions from the continental shelf north of Svalbard out into the deep basins of the central Arctic Ocean. Along the way, they used calibrated echo sounders, which send sound waves into the water and detect the echoes that bounce back from fish and zooplankton, and a specially adapted trawl designed to work through openings in the sea ice. The goal was to build the first systematic picture of what fish live in these waters, how deep they go, and how many are there.

Near the continental slope, conditions were relatively productive. The researchers found capelin, polar cod, and other species associated with the nutrient-rich Atlantic water that flows into the Arctic from the south. Zooplankton, the tiny animals that form the base of the food web for fish, seabirds, and marine mammals, were present in reasonable densities.

Then they crossed over the slope and into the deep basins, where the seabed drops to more than 3,000 metres and the water column is dominated by cold, low-salinity Arctic water. The transition was stark.

“When we reached the cold, deep waters, there was nothing there. It was completely empty of fish,” said Haakon Hop, a senior researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute and one of the study’s authors.

The echo sounders, which are sensitive enough to detect individual fish, returned almost no signal. The trawl catches confirmed it: beyond the continental slope, the mesopelagic zone, the layer of water between 200 and 1,000 metres deep that in other oceans teems with lanternfish, bristlemouths, and other small deep-water species, was essentially vacant.

The findings matter for two reasons. The first is ecological. The mesopelagic zone in the North Atlantic and sub-Arctic is relatively well-populated. Its absence in the central Arctic suggests that the deep Arctic Ocean may be one of the least productive bodies of water on the planet for fish, a biological desert beneath the ice that has largely escaped scientific attention because it is so hard to reach. The study, published this week in Communications Earth & Environment, is one of the first to survey these waters systematically using both acoustic and trawl methods.

The second reason is political. The Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, signed by ten parties in 2018, placed a moratorium on commercial fishing in the high seas of the central Arctic for at least 16 years, largely because so little was known about what lived there. This study provides the first substantial baseline, and that baseline suggests there is almost nothing to catch. The moratorium, in other words, is not protecting a fishery from exploitation. It is protecting an emptiness from becoming one.

As Arctic sea ice continues to shrink, the question of whether commercial fish species will eventually move into these waters has been debated for years. Some projections suggested that warming could open new fishing grounds. This study suggests otherwise: the deep Arctic basins lack the conditions that support fish populations, and the biological pathways that would need to develop for colonisation to occur are complex and uncertain.

Ocean acidification is breaking apart the social structures that keep reef fish alive, and the fish themselves do not seem to notice.

For small fish on a coral reef, survival depends on being part of a group. Fish in shoals spot predators faster. They forage more efficiently. The simple mathematics of dilution, more bodies meaning any one fish is less likely to be the one that gets eaten, keeps individuals alive in ways that no amount of individual vigilance could replicate.

A new study from Adelaide University, published this week in the Journal of Animal Ecology, has found that ocean acidification is quietly dismantling these social structures by degrading the reefs that make them possible.

The research team, led by Dr Angus Mitchell and supervised by Professor Ivan Nagelkerken, worked at an unusual set of coral reefs in Japan that sit near volcanic CO2 seeps on the seafloor. These seeps naturally raise the acidity of the surrounding water to levels that closely match what scientists project for the broader ocean later this century under continued carbon emissions. Some nearby reefs experience present-day chemistry. Others are warmer. Some experience both elevated temperature and acidity together. The site functions as a living laboratory for studying what climate change does to reef ecosystems, without needing to wait decades for the conditions to arrive.

What the researchers found was not what they expected. The direct effects of warming and acidification on individual fish behaviour were, in most cases, minimal. Individual fish seemed to cope. They were not disoriented, not visibly stressed, not behaving abnormally in any obvious way.

The damage was structural. On reefs where acidification had reduced the complexity of the coral, the branching structures, caves, overhangs, and crevices that provide shelter and gathering points for fish, the fish formed smaller shoals. Smaller shoals meant less social protection. Fish in those groups were more cautious, spent more time hiding, and ventured into the open less frequently.

“In the real world, fish do not experience climate change in isolation,” Nagelkerken said. “They experience it as members of communities, shaped by the habitat around them and the other individuals they live alongside. Our results suggest that even when individual fish seem to be coping fine behaviourally under climate stress, the social structures supporting their behavioural expression can quietly fall apart.”

The mechanism is indirect, which is what makes it easy to miss. Acidification dissolves the calcium carbonate that corals use to build their skeletons. As reefs lose structural complexity, the physical spaces that support large aggregations of fish disappear. The fish do not die from the acidity. They die from the loneliness that follows the loss of their habitat.

The global network of instruments watching the ocean is under pressure at the moment it is needed most.

The Global Ocean Observing System, known as GOOS, is the closest thing the world has to a continuous monitoring system for the state of the ocean. It is built from a patchwork of complementary platforms, each designed to measure different parts of the ocean in different ways, and together they underpin the weather forecasts, climate projections, fisheries management systems, and disaster warnings that modern societies rely on.

Its most visible component is Argo, a fleet of roughly 4,000 autonomous robotic floats distributed across the world’s oceans. Every ten days, each float sinks to a depth of 2,000 metres, then rises slowly back to the surface, recording temperature and salinity as it ascends. When it reaches the surface, it transmits its data via satellite to ground stations, where it is made freely available to anyone within 24 hours. The programme has been running since 2000 and has fundamentally changed how scientists understand ocean heat content, salinity trends, and sea level change.

The challenge, as a new piece in The Conversation this week describes, is maintenance. Argo floats last four to five years before their batteries fail. The fleet must be continually replenished to prevent gaps from opening up across the oceans. The expansion to OneArgo, which would add biogeochemical sensors, deep-diving floats capable of reaching 6,000 metres, and instruments designed for marginal seas and polar waters, requires sustained international funding that is not yet secured.

New Zealand provides a case study in what smaller countries can contribute: the research vessel Kaharoa has deployed more than 1,100 Argo floats for international partners across the Pacific and Southern Oceans since 2004. Elephant seals fitted with sensors collect data beneath polar sea ice in regions no other instrument can easily reach.

The piece, written by scientists involved in the programme, argues that national ocean observing strategies need to be developed, that ocean observations should be embedded in climate adaptation planning, and that governments should recognise ocean data as critical infrastructure.

The argument has particular force this week. Deep Brief #37’s good news edition covered the Rothera Time Series in Antarctica, 28 years of weekly water sampling sustained by scientists who kept going out in a boat regardless of whether anyone was paying attention. The GOOS story is the global version of the same principle: continuous measurement is the infrastructure that everything else depends on, and it is the first thing to be cut when budgets tighten. The instruments do not lobby for themselves. If governments do not fund them, the data stops, and nobody notices until the next forecast goes wrong.

Quick Hits

Ninety-eight per cent of Europeans say protecting marine life is important, but only 14 per cent identify underwater noise as a threat to the ocean. A survey conducted by Ipsos for the International Fund for Animal Welfare across France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden in March 2026 found that once the impact of shipping noise on marine mammals was explained, 89 per cent of respondents said the issue should be addressed urgently, and more than 80 per cent supported practical measures including mandatory ship speed reductions. IFAW is calling on the EU to integrate ship speed limits into the revised Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the upcoming European Ocean Act. The gap between the 98 per cent who care and the 14 per cent who know about noise is itself the finding: the problem is not public indifference, it is public invisibility.

The European Commission has launched a public consultation on the European Ocean Act, with responses open until 16 July 2026. The Ocean Act, a key legislative proposal under the European Ocean Pact adopted in June 2025, aims to consolidate all EU economic, climate, environmental, and social targets for the ocean into a single legal framework. It would modernise maritime spatial planning, create a legal basis for the EU’s OceanEye observation initiative, and align with the ongoing revision of the Marine Strategy Framework Directive. The Commission plans to adopt the legislative proposal by the end of 2026. Whether it delivers meaningful enforcement mechanisms or becomes another layer of aspiration without teeth remains to be seen.

A great white shark has been caught in the western Mediterranean for the first time in years, and scientists are asking whether warming seas could push the species further north. A juvenile great white, just over two metres long and weighing between 80 and 90 kilograms, was captured in Spanish Mediterranean waters in April 2023. The finding, published this year in Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria, contributes to a slow accumulation of evidence that sub-tropical species are expanding their range as ocean temperatures rise. Great whites already frequent the Bay of Biscay. Whether they will eventually appear in Irish or British waters is speculative, but the direction of travel, for this species and many others, is northward.

Hard Truth From The Sea

Scientists sailed into the central Arctic and found an ocean almost completely empty of fish. On coral reefs in Japan, fish are forming smaller groups because the structures they gather around are dissolving. The global network of instruments that tracks what is happening in the ocean is running on batteries that last five years, and the funding to replace them is not guaranteed. Each of these stories describes a different kind of absence: the absence of life where life was expected, the absence of shelter where shelter once existed, the absence of commitment to the measurement systems that would tell us how much we are losing. The ocean is full of things that are quietly disappearing. The question is whether we are watching closely enough to notice before they are gone.

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- Luke

Arsenal won the English Premier League last night, and they weren’t even playing.

They were watching Manchester City draw 1-1 at Bournemouth, and when the whistle went, the title was theirs. Twenty-two years of waiting, confirmed by someone else’s result on a Tuesday night, hundreds of miles from anyone in a red and white shirt.

I’ve been an Arsenal fan for over thirty-five years. Twenty-two of those have been spent waiting for last night. The High Seas Treaty took the same twenty-two years to come into force this January.

So forgive me for noticing it, but it’s also a perfect illustration of how the work I cover actually gets done.

Because the climactic moment isn’t where the work happens. The work happened months earlier, in games that didn’t trend, on nights when the title felt a hundred points away. By the time the trophy arrived, it had already been won.

I keep thinking about this because most of the ocean conservation stories I follow work the same way, and most of us are still waiting for the wrong moment.

The Long Wait for Success

On 17 January 2026, the High Seas Treaty entered into force. The agreement, formally the BBNJ Agreement, provides the first legal framework to protect biodiversity in the two-thirds of the ocean that lies beyond any country’s jurisdiction. It is the biggest expansion of ocean governance in a generation.

Almost nothing happened on the day it became law.

Morocco had ratified the previous September, the sixtieth country to do so, which, under Article 68, triggered a 120-day countdown. The countdown expired on a Saturday. There was no ceremony; the treaty just became binding on the countries that had ratified it.

UN-facilitated talks began in June 2004 with an informal consultative meeting. An Ad Hoc Working Group then spent nine years, between 2006 and 2015, just studying whether a treaty was feasible. A Preparatory Committee took another two years to draft elements of the text. The Intergovernmental Conference that finally negotiated the agreement convened in 2018 and met five times before reaching consensus in June 2023. Then came the slow business of getting sixty countries to ratify, which took another two and a half years.

Twenty-two years from the first talks to entry into force. The same gap that just separated Arsenal from their last title. Nine of those years were spent deciding whether to start.

The story that gets told about BBNJ is the one from June 2023, when delegates applauded the adopted text and the headlines called it historic. That moment got the photographs. But the treaty wasn’t won in June 2023. It was won in 2004, when an informal meeting put the question on the table. It was won in the rooms between 2006 and 2015 where a working group failed to draft anything binding and somebody decided to keep meeting anyway. It was won by Palau being the first to ratify in January 2024, and by every country that ratified in the eighteen months after. By the time the threshold was crossed, the win had already happened.

When BBNJ enters its first Conference of Parties later this year, that meeting will be reported as the moment ocean protection became real. It won’t be. The moment will have happened years earlier, in rooms that nobody photographed.

The Other Tuesday Night Games

Once you start looking, BBNJ isn’t even the exception. It’s the template.

Across ocean governance, dozens of processes are running concurrently, each on its own slow grind, each invisible to almost everyone except the people inside it.

In Geneva last August, the sixth round of formal negotiations for a global plastics treaty broke down. Delegates from 185 countries worked past the deadline into the early hours. The chair resigned. Headlines called it a failure, a missed opportunity, no solution in sight. In February 2026, a new chair was elected. The next round is expected late this year or early next. If you’re sitting inside year three of what is probably a twenty-year negotiation, this looks like a collapse. In twenty years, it will probably look like the unglamorous middle of a process that worked.

In Kingston, in March, the International Seabed Authority concluded another round of negotiations on whether to allow commercial deep-sea mining. Forty nations now support a moratorium or precautionary pause, up from a handful five years ago. No Mining Code was adopted. No mining was approved. The Metals Company, having tried to bypass the ISA entirely by applying directly to the US government under a Trump executive order, is now under investigation by the very body it was trying to sidestep.

The whaling moratorium, agreed in 1982 after years of failed votes at the IWC and thirty-six years after the Commission was founded to manage rather than restrict the industry, has saved most great whale species from the brink. It also hasn’t held cleanly. Japan left the IWC in 2019, added fin whales to its commercial quota in 2024, and set 2026 catch limits at over 400 animals. The work of defending the moratorium is now older than the moratorium itself.

None of these processes will produce a climactic moment that makes the news. Plastics will not be “solved” by a treaty signing. A single vote will not stop deep-sea mining. The whaling moratorium will not be celebrated by anyone outside the room when it survives another challenge. Between them, these processes, and dozens more like them, protect what’s left of the ocean.

The Honest Version of the Lesson

Arsenal finished second in the Premier League in 2022-23. Second again in 2023-24. Second again in 2024-25. Three consecutive runner-up finishes, each one accompanied by the same well-meaning commentary about how this group of players didn't quite have what it took. By April this year, three-quarters through what was looking like a fourth such season, Arsenal lost 2-1 at Manchester City. The title race appeared to be slipping away. At the final whistle, Declan Rice was crouched on the pitch when he looked up at his captain, Martin Ødegaard, who appeared to have lost belief. Rice shook his head and said: "It's not done."

It would have been entirely reasonable, in that moment, to conclude that it was done. The title was out of their hands for the first time since October. The collapse looked plausible.

Arsenal won their next four league games without conceding a goal.

The optimistic story about persistence is that if you keep going, you’ll eventually win. It’s not quite true. The plastics treaty might never be agreed. The deep-sea mining moratorium movement might be overrun by a few states acting unilaterally. The whaling moratorium might be undermined further if more nations follow Japan out of the IWC. Sometimes you keep going, and you still lose.

Keep going wins, because quitting guarantees losing. The work is worth doing whether or not it succeeds. The alternative is to decide that the moment hasn’t arrived, so the moment must not be coming, so the work must not be working. That logic guarantees the loss. Every campaign that ever produced a result was built by people who could have reasonably concluded, ten years in, that it wasn’t going to work.

Most of the people doing this work right now will not be in the room when the result comes. The lawyers drafting the BBNJ text in 2009 did not all live to see Morocco ratify. The IWC delegates who voted in 1982 were mostly not in the rooms in 1972 where the idea first failed. The people sitting in Kingston this March, arguing for a moratorium on deep-sea mining, will not all be there when the question is finally settled.

That, I think, is the actual deal. You do the unglamorous work, year after year, in rooms nobody is reporting from, against opposition that is better-resourced and more patient than you expected. You finish second for as long as it takes. And one Tuesday night, somebody else’s result confirms what your work has already decided.

Years ago, in the early days of manager Mikel Arteta’s tenure, a blacked-out silhouette of the Premier League trophy was installed at Arsenal’s training ground. The players walked past it every morning. The intention was that one day, when Arsenal were champions again, the silhouette would be lit up.

Most of the people doing the work that will protect what’s left of the ocean are walking past their own version of that silhouette right now. The lights aren’t on yet. They might never come on.

The work happens anyway.

Somewhere off the Ningaloo coast of Western Australia, in a submarine canyon that drops to more than four and a half kilometres, a giant squid shed a few cells into the surrounding seawater. It may have brushed against a rock, expelled waste, or simply moved through the water column. The cells drifted. Months later, a team of scientists on the research vessel Falkor filtered a sample of that water, extracted the DNA it contained, and matched it to Architeuthis dux, the largest invertebrate on the planet. Nobody saw the animal. Nobody needed to. Its genetic signature was enough.

That story leads this week’s Deep Brief, alongside a new gasfield approval ten kilometres from the Twelve Apostles on Australia’s Great Ocean Road, and a reflection on what David Attenborough, who turned 100 yesterday, showed the world about the ocean and what governments have done with the knowledge since. Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.

Deep Dives

A giant squid’s DNA has been found in Western Australian waters for the first time in over 25 years. It was one of 226 species detected by filtering seawater.

Scientists from Curtin University, the University of Western Australia, and the Western Australian Museum collected more than 1,000 water samples from the deep Cape Range and Cloates submarine canyons off the Ningaloo coast, roughly 1,200 kilometres north of Perth, at depths reaching 4,510 metres. They were looking for environmental DNA, the genetic material that every living animal sheds invisibly into the water around it through skin cells, waste, mucus, and reproductive material.

From those samples, the team identified 226 species across 11 major animal groups. Among them: the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), detected in six separate samples from both canyons, the first record of the species in Western Australian waters in more than a quarter of a century and the northernmost confirmed detection of giant squid in the entire eastern Indian Ocean.

Giant squid can grow longer than a school bus, typically between 10 and 13 metres, and weigh up to 275 kilograms. Their eyes, at up to 30 centimetres in diameter, are the largest of any animal on Earth. Despite their size and near-global distribution, they are almost never seen alive. Fewer than a dozen have been filmed in their natural habitat in the deep ocean.

The survey also detected Cuvier’s beaked whales, the deepest-diving mammals known to science, pygmy sperm whales, sleeper sharks, the faceless cusk eel, and the slender snaggletooth. Dozens of species had never been recorded in Western Australian waters before. Some of the DNA sequences did not match anything in existing genetic databases, meaning they may belong to species that have not yet been formally described.

The study, published this week in the journal Environmental DNA, was conducted aboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor. Lead author Georgia Nester, who carried out the research as part of her PhD at Curtin University and is now at the University of Western Australia, described the results as transformative. “With eDNA, a single water sample can tell us about hundreds of species at once,” she said. “That means we can dramatically expand our understanding of deep-water environments in a way that simply hasn’t been possible before.”

The implications stretch beyond Western Australia. Environmental DNA surveys are fast, non-invasive, and scalable. They do not require scientists to see, capture, or disturb any animal. A single filtered water sample from a deep-sea canyon can reveal the presence of species that traditional surveys using nets, cameras, or submersibles might never detect. For regions of the ocean that are too deep, too remote, or too expensive to survey by conventional means, which is most of the deep ocean, eDNA may be the only realistic way to establish what lives there.

“Deep-sea ecosystems are vast, remote and expensive to study, yet they face growing pressure from climate change, fishing and resource extraction,” said Zoe Richards, a co-author and associate professor at Curtin University. “You can’t protect what you don’t know exists.”

Australia has approved a new gasfield ten kilometres from the Twelve Apostles. The government that greenlit it has a 95 per cent renewable energy target.

The Victorian and Australian federal governments, both Labor, announced on Thursday that they had granted a production licence for Amplitude Energy’s Annie gasfield in the Otway Basin, off the coast of Victoria. The site sits roughly nine kilometres offshore from Peterborough and Port Campbell, on the Great Ocean Road, about twelve kilometres west of the Twelve Apostles, one of Australia’s most visited natural landmarks and a designated marine national park.

Federal Resources Minister Madeleine King said the project would supply gas exclusively to the domestic market, easing the risk of potential shortfalls on Australia’s east coast. Amplitude Energy estimates the field will supply about four per cent of east coast gas demand for five years. Gas from the Annie field, in water depths of roughly 55 metres, will be processed at the existing Athena plant. Production is expected by 2028.

The approval is the second major gas project Labor has authorised this term, following the 2022 Victorian election in which then-Premier Daniel Andrews campaigned heavily on reviving the State Electricity Commission and accelerating the transition to renewables. Victoria has a legislated target of 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035.

For environmentalists, the approval undercuts the government’s own climate ambitions. Approving new fossil fuel extraction while pursuing aggressive renewable energy targets sends contradictory signals. The argument from government is that the transition requires bridging fuel to maintain energy security during the shift from coal and gas to renewables, and that domestic gas supply reduces reliance on more carbon-intensive imports.

The counter-argument, made by conservation and climate groups, is that new gas infrastructure locks in emissions for the life of the asset and that alternative sources of energy security, including battery storage, demand management, and accelerated renewable build-out, are available and increasingly cost-competitive. The presence of the gasfield near a marine national park adds an environmental dimension beyond carbon: the risk of operational discharges, spills, and acoustic disturbance to a stretch of coastline that is nationally significant for both tourism and marine biodiversity.

This story will be familiar to readers of this newsletter. In Australia, as in the UK, the gap between what governments promise on climate and what they approve in practice continues to widen. Whether the Annie gasfield turns out to be a necessary bridge or an unnecessary lock-in depends on how fast the renewable transition actually moves, and on whether the government that approved it is held to its own targets.

David Attenborough turned 100 yesterday. The ocean he showed the world is in worse shape than when he started filming it.

David Attenborough was born on 8 May 1926. Yesterday, on his 100th birthday, he remains the most recognisable voice in nature broadcasting and one of the most trusted figures in public life anywhere in the world. His career spans the transition from black-and-white studio television to 4K underwater cinematography. His programmes, from The Blue Planet in 2001 to Ocean in 2025, have brought the deep sea, coral reefs, open ocean ecosystems, and the creatures that inhabit them into hundreds of millions of living rooms.

What Attenborough did, more than any other broadcaster, was show people the ocean as a living system rather than a backdrop. The Blue Planet and its sequel Blue Planet II revealed the complexity of marine ecosystems in ways that shifted public attitudes. Blue Planet II in particular is widely credited with sparking a global movement against single-use plastics, leading several countries to introduce bans or restrictions. His 2025 feature-length documentary Ocean, now streaming on Disney+, went further, including footage of bottom trawlers ploughing up the seabed off the UK coast.

The New Statesman, in a piece published to mark his birthday, argues that governments must honour his legacy with action rather than warm words and commemorative stamps. The piece, written by Greenpeace’s Will McCallum, calls on the UK to use the Global Ocean Treaty to protect areas of the Atlantic, to ensure its marine protected areas are genuinely managed, and to implement a full ban on bottom trawling.

The timing is pointed. Last week’s Deep Brief covered the UK Marine Strategy report, which found that 13 of 15 indicators of ocean health are failing, uncertain, or declining, despite 377 marine protected areas covering 38 per cent of UK seas. Attenborough’s legacy includes both what he showed us and the uncomfortable question of whether knowing about the ocean’s wonders and its decline has produced commensurate action. The evidence, on his 100th birthday, suggests it has not.

Attenborough himself has shifted from traditional broadcaster to something closer to a campaigner in recent years, using his authority to advocate for systemic change. His witness statement film A Life on Our Planet (2020) laid out both the problem and his proposed solutions. Whether those solutions are adopted is no longer a question for Attenborough. It is a question for the people who grew up watching his programmes and now hold the positions of power that could deliver them.

Quick Hits

The deepest hydrothermal vents on Earth sit nearly five kilometres below the Caribbean Sea, and they are teeming with life. The Beebe Vent Field, discovered in 2010 by the crew of the RRS James Cook in the Cayman Trough, lies at 4,968 metres depth. Water erupting from its black smoker chimneys reaches 401°C but does not boil because the pressure at that depth is roughly 500 times atmospheric pressure. Despite the extreme heat and total darkness, the vents support thriving communities of shrimp, snails, and microbial life that derive their energy from chemical reactions rather than sunlight, a process called chemosynthesis. Discover Wildlife published a detailed profile of the Beebe field this week, and it is worth reading for anyone interested in the conditions under which life can persist.

Researchers in China sank a cow carcass to 1,629 metres in the South China Sea to mimic a whale fall, and eight Pacific sleeper sharks showed up. The study, published in Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research in June 2025 and resurfacing in coverage this week, documented the first recorded appearance of Pacific sleeper sharks in the South China Sea, significantly expanding the known range of a species typically associated with the cold deep waters of the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, and Baja California. The researchers at Sun Yat-sen University observed larger sharks tearing aggressively at the carcass while smaller individuals circled and waited, suggesting a feeding hierarchy. Every shark observed was female, raising the possibility that the South China Sea may serve as a nursery ground for the species.

Scientists in Halifax are testing whether adding alkaline minerals to seawater can help the ocean absorb more carbon dioxide. Planetary Technologies is running one of the world’s first coastal ocean alkalinity enhancement projects in Halifax Harbour, Canada, introducing alkaline minerals through the cooling water discharge pipe of a natural gas power plant. Researchers from Duke University deployed instruments in August 2025 to measure how the surrounding ecosystem is responding. Ocean alkalinity enhancement works by reducing seawater acidity, which increases its capacity to absorb and store atmospheric CO2 for centuries. The approach is gaining attention as a potential complement to emissions reductions, though questions about ecological impact, monitoring, and scale remain unresolved.

Hard Truth From The Sea

David Attenborough turned 100 yesterday. He spent a career showing people what lives in the ocean, and in doing so made it harder for anyone to claim they did not know. That knowledge has not translated into proportionate action. The UK still allows bottom trawling in its marine protected areas. Australia approves new gasfields within sight of its most famous coastline. And in a canyon off Western Australia, a giant squid leaves its DNA in the water for scientists to find, in a region so unexplored that more than 200 species had never been recorded there before. Attenborough’s gift was wonder. The question his centenary poses is whether wonder, on its own, was ever enough.

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See you next week.

-Luke

A study published last week in Communications Earth & Environment makes a measurement that hasn’t been made before. Over the past two decades, a layer of warm water deep beneath the Southern Ocean has been shifting south, towards the Antarctic continent, at an average rate of about 1.26 kilometres per year. Compounded over twenty years, that comes to roughly 25 kilometres of poleward redistribution, a meaningful fraction of the distance between the typical core of this warm layer and the Antarctic continental shelf.

The water is called Circumpolar Deep Water. It sits between roughly 200 and 2,000 metres down, wrapping around the continent, and it carries the heat that melts Antarctic ice shelves from below.

Those shelves matter because they hold back the much larger ice sheet behind them. The ice that sits on the Antarctic continent, if it eventually entered the ocean, would raise global sea level by about 58 metres.

The new study, led by Joshua Lanham at the University of Cambridge with colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UCLA, uses two independent datasets to show that the warm layer is expanding nearer the continent and contracting further north. Both methods reach the same conclusion. Earlier observational work had already detected poleward shifts in specific regions of East Antarctica. What is new here is a circumpolar picture, built from a methodology that bridges two very different kinds of ocean data.

Why warm water at depth matters

Circumpolar Deep Water is warm because of where it came from. It originated in the North Atlantic and Pacific, sank with more heat than the abyssal water around it, and travelled south on timescales of decades to centuries, retaining much of that heat as it went. By the time it reaches the Southern Ocean it is no longer warm in any everyday sense, typically a degree or two above freezing, but compared with the near-freezing surface waters around Antarctica and the ice it might encounter, the temperature difference is substantial. When it reaches the underside of an ice shelf, that small difference is enough to drive significant melting.

The reason warm water can sit beneath cold water in this part of the ocean is salinity. Cold water near Antarctica is freshened by sea ice melt and precipitation, while the deeper layer carries higher salt content from its origins thousands of kilometres away. Salt makes water heavier. The deeper layer is denser despite being warmer, and stratification holds it in place.

Ice shelves are floating extensions of the ice sheet that sits on the Antarctic continent. They do not themselves contribute to sea level when they melt, because they are already in the water. What they do is buttress the glaciers and ice behind them. When ice shelves thin or collapse, the inland ice flows faster into the sea. Basal melt, driven by ocean heat reaching the underside of these shelves, is the dominant control on ice shelf mass loss. Surface melt matters far less than what is going on underneath.

What the study did

The first dataset is a network of repeat ship surveys called GO-SHIP, in which research vessels sail the same lines across the world’s oceans every decade or so, lowering instruments that measure temperature, salinity, oxygen, and a handful of other chemical tracers from surface to seabed. These measurements are precise but the lines are widely spaced and visited infrequently. Comparing surveys from 2005-2010 against surveys from 2015 onwards, the team found that warm Circumpolar Deep Water had increased in concentration nearer the Antarctic continent and decreased further north.

The second dataset is the Argo float programme: nearly four thousand robotic floats drifting through the world’s oceans, surfacing every ten days to transmit profiles of temperature and salinity in the upper 2,000 metres. The Argo data offers monthly resolution and global coverage, which the ship surveys cannot. The floats only measure two variables, however, which is not enough to identify water masses using the standard chemical-fingerprint method that ship surveys allow.

The team’s solution was to train a machine learning model on the rich GO-SHIP data, where water masses can be identified directly from the chemistry, and then apply that model to the sparser Argo measurements to fill in the spatial and temporal gaps. When tested against ship measurements it had not been trained on, the model performed well in nearly every region of the Southern Ocean. Applied to twenty years of Argo data, it produced the same poleward shift the ship surveys had shown, with finer detail. The pattern is the dominant feature of the twenty-year record once seasonal variation is removed, which is what makes the paper persuasive.

What the paper does and does not show

The study demonstrates that warm deep water has shifted closer to the Antarctic continent. It does not directly measure how much additional heat is reaching the ice shelves themselves. The Argo float data used in the analysis stops at 65°S, the latitude band immediately north of the Antarctic shelf, and it cannot sample the near-shelf waters where ice melt actually happens.

What the study does show is that within the band of ocean immediately north of the continent, ocean heat content in the warm-water layer has been accumulating at a rate equivalent to a continuous 2.81 terawatts of energy. That is a substantial amount of heat building up close to where the ice meets the sea. Whether and how much of it is currently crossing onto the shelves depends on local processes the study cannot resolve at continental scale. Winds, eddies, bathymetry, and the behaviour of dense shelf water that can act as a barrier all shape what happens at the final stretch.

The mechanism behind the migration is also unsettled. The paper presents two broad candidates. The first is that dense, cold water that normally sinks near the Antarctic coast (Antarctic Bottom Water) has been weakening, a trend already observed in independent studies, and as it contracts the warm layer migrates south to fill the space. The second is that wind-driven changes in the Southern Ocean, including strengthening westerly winds and a poleward shift in the wind belt itself, have moved the position of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and the upwelling pathways of warm water along with it. The two mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and the paper does not pick between them.

Why this is significant

Until now, scientists have relied largely on climate models to project what would happen as the Southern Ocean warmed. The models suggested that warm deep water would shift poleward and that ice shelf melt would accelerate as a result. Observational evidence for the shift has been piecemeal and regional.

This study is the first to show, from observations rather than projections, that the predicted shift is already underway across the entire Southern Ocean. As Lanham put it in the Cambridge press release, this is no longer a possible future scenario, it is something that is happening now.

The timescales over which the world is making decisions about climate, ice loss, and sea level rise rely on assumptions about what is happening to Antarctic ice. If the heat delivery system is shifting in the way this study describes, the question is not whether basal melting accelerates but how quickly. The paper does not answer that question, but it does establish that the question has stopped being hypothetical.

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