The Atlantis resort in the Bahamas is an imposing place. It sits just north of downtown Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, on its own little stretch of sand dubbed Paradise Island. The main building ...

Gray clouds hang low over the Trondheim Fjord, a huge, convoluted indentation in the central Norwegian coast. A gusting wind blows the tops off the waves, tosses rain in my face, and fills Braute’s ...

Most people, even those who know a thing or two about oysters and may perhaps enjoy eating them, have no idea that the sweet and buttery bivalves they are slurping down in San Francisco or Vancouver ...

It’s 3:00 a.m. on the island of Malta, and in the stillness before most residents wake to begin their day, a shark is about to give birth. This is especially strange, not just because it’s happening ...

On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that ...

In the grand scheme of things, Michael Moore regrets losing his sense of smell decades ago as the result of chemical exposure in veterinary school. It may have spared him some discomfort, though, on ...

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He ...

Our boat noses into the craggy, primordial shore of Hecate Island. The first two off the deck have their hand lenses out before the rest of us touch land. They are Randal Mindell and Dan Tucker, both ...

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over ...

Logs the size of telephone poles drift along the shore of the Salish Sea. Erik Hammond turns the wheel of his aluminum skiff and closes in. He grabs his ax and towlines, then leaps atop the floating ...

Early on a calm June morning, Nancy Treneman picks her way along the wrack line of a stretch of southwestern Oregon coast. The biologist has short, curly hair that furls in small wings from beneath ...

When one-third of the Australian continent was submerged, ancestors of the world’s oldest living cultures were there to see it. Lands that once were wide open to exploration and home to many people ...