The Deep Brief #5 | Friday 27 June 2025

Your end-of-week ocean intelligence, built to inform, agitate, and equip you.

Each Friday, I scan global headlines, frontline campaigns, and scientific papers to bring you the most urgent, overlooked, or powerful stories shaping our relationship with the sea. It is unfiltered, sometimes uncomfortable, but most definitely unmissable.

Three deep dives. Three quick hits. One hard truth from the sea.

This week, the giants are vanishing. Fish are shrinking. Plumes are rising. The past is knocking louder than ever.

---

Deep Dives

The Disappearance of Giants

Large-bodied and predatory reef fish in the western Indian Ocean, including sharks, groupers, humphead wrasse, and humphead parrotfish, are rapidly disappearing due to overfishing, poor enforcement of marine protections, and climate change. A new study spanning seven countries reveals widespread “zero sightings” of these key species, even in protected areas. Their loss threatens coral reef health, food security, and coastal livelihoods.
👉 Read the full commentary →

A New Ocean Is Splitting Africa Apart

Beneath Ethiopia’s Afar region, a mantle plume is pulsing like a heartbeat, tearing the African continent apart. This is not metaphor. Sea will one day fill the rift. A new ocean is forming, and the land itself is giving way. The ocean is not static. Neither is the world we have built around it.
👉 Explore the science →

Deep Sea Mining Could Gut the Unknown

Even the remotest parts of the ocean are not safe. A new study warns that deep sea mining could send sediment, noise, and light into ecosystems thousands of kilometres offshore. This activity could disrupt species we have not even named yet. We are risking damage to worlds we do not understand for minerals we barely recycle.
👉 Read the study summary →

---

Quick Hits

Cargo Catastrophe
A ship carrying 3,000 cars caught fire and sank in the Pacific. The crew survived. The ocean will not. The wreck now leaks fuel, metals, and microplastics.
👉 Read the story →

Cod Collapse
Baltic cod were once giants. Now they barely reach maturity. Chronic overfishing and warming seas have driven the population into a slow and quiet collapse.
👉 More on Oceanographic →

Europe Bets Big on Blue
The EU’s new Ocean Pact will inject €330 million into marine research, climate modelling, and biodiversity protection. The scale is promising. The timing is critical.
👉 Policy announcement →

---

One Hard Truth

Carbon does not whisper. It burps.

New research shows that ancient extinction events did not creep in slowly. They arrived in violent bursts. Massive volcanic “burps” of carbon dioxide acidified the ocean and crashed biodiversity within decades.

The pattern is not a mystery.

Today, we are releasing carbon even faster. The source is not magma but machines. Ocean acidification, oxygen loss, coral bleaching, and ecosystem collapse are already underway. These are not distant risks. We are replicating the conditions of past mass extinction events in real time.

This is not just climate change. It is system shock.
👉 Read the full report →

---

Stay With the Current

A group of students in Greece is using satellites to track climate impacts on the ocean. They are 17. They do not have grants. They have questions, code, and determination.
👉 Read their story →

Pew just published a sharp breakdown of what the next wave of ocean research will require. The insights are clear. The stakes are high.
👉 Explore the future →

---

Final Thought

The giants are vanishing. The planet is speaking. The warnings are not whispers anymore. They are roars from the deep.

We can track collapse in real time. So the question is this: why are we not stopping it?

---

Forward this to someone who needs to understand what is happening beneath the surface. Subscribe for free, or go deeper and pledge to support this work.