Water & Oceans

"Texas coal companies are leaving behind contaminated land. The state is letting them."

"The bowhead whale hunt is an essential cultural and subsistence tradition for the Inupiat of Alaska's North Slope. It dates back at least 1,500 years, and annual harvests can supply families with hundreds of pounds of meat."

"Conowingo Dam owner Exelon Corp. and the state of Maryland have reached a settlement under which the Chicago-based energy company will invest $200 million to clean up the Susquehanna River, and, by extension, the Chesapeake Bay."

"Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities."

"In 1849, Harriet Tubman escaped from the Eastern Shore farm where she was enslaved. Over the next several years, she would return 13 times, rescuing more than 70 enslaved relatives and friends, ... She has become a hero, with two national parks established in her honor, ... . But time has not been as kind to the lands that Tubman left behind, or the descendants of the first free African-American communities that called them home."

"Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death."

"Environmentalists hoping to save the North Atlantic right whale won a case in federal court in Washington, D.C., Monday, banning walls of fishing net that entangle the species, which has been on the brink of extinction since the 1970s."

"Governments, businesses, organizations and research institutions made commitments toward improving marine health and productivity worth more than $63 billion at the Our Ocean 2019 conference in Oslo on Oct. 23 and 24."

"A thick sludge of crude oil has been washing up on vast stretches of Brazil’s coast for nearly two months, and authorities and experts have been baffled by its origin."