Remembering the 9th Anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster
As the Trump administration proposes to rollback regulations on offshore drilling, let’s take a look at why these safety measures were put in place to begin with. Nine years ago, on April 20th, 2010, the Gulf of Mexico f...
Remembering the 9th Anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Disaster
Bob Spies is Senior Scientist and former President at Applied Marine Sciences, which he founded in 1990. He has served as Chief Science Advisor to governments on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Restoration Program, and Scienc...
Hard Lessons From a Disastrous Oil Spill
Thirty years ago—just after midnight on March 24, 1989—the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The damaged ship spilled roughly 11 million gallons of oil into the ocean, killing and injuring...
Preventing Another Exxon Valdez Disaster
Steven Reinhold is one of the original creators of the hashtag #trashtag, which encourages people to post pictures picking up trash in the environment. Started a few years ago, it went viral a week ago when a Facebook us...
Interview with the Founder of #TrashTag, Steven Reinhold
During the greenest month of them all, I’ve rounded up some of the coolest green marine wildlife that our ocean has to offer. Take a look at these festive species and find out some fascinating fun facts about them. Green...
Green Marine Species to Celebrate This (Almost) Spring
On February 5th, the MV Solomon Trader (a Hong Kong-flagged bulk carrier) lost its mooring and ran aground on a coral reef off the island of Rennell in the southern Solomon Islands. So far, the damaged vessel has spilled...
Devastating Heavy Fuel Oil Spill in Solomon Islands Highlights Risks of World’s Dirtiest Fuel
It’s not uncommon to hear ocean lovers say that their favorite whale is the “killer whale”—or, under less menacing and more accurate terminology, the orca (scientifically dubbed Orcinus orca). These marine mammals are in...
Why is an Orca Not a Whale?
As if being a Monday morning wasn’t enough, the Anchorage Daily News headline read “Bering Sea ice is at an ‘unprecedented’ low right now.” March is when sea ice should be at its maximum extent, in some years reaching fa...
Where is the Ice?
Last week, I was invited by Congresswoman Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX), Chair of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Environment Subcommittee, to testify before Congress on the urgency of acting to protect c...
Corals, Lobsters and Oysters—Oh My!
The effects of climate change can range from prosaic to pernicious, from scary to surprising. A recent paper in Nature Communications spurred the imagination of readers and reporters by discussing how ocean color may cha...