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 ...

It was a cool spring morning on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island when the ground began to buckle and heave. On the Richter scale, the earthquake reached a magnitude of 7.3 at a place called ...

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 ...

When Culum Brown was a young boy, he and his grandmother frequented a park near her home in Melbourne, Australia. He was fascinated by the park’s large ornamental pond wriggling with goldfish, ...

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 ...

Located in a quiet part of Tahiti, in French Polynesia, the village of Tautira sits on the ocean’s edge, framed by black sand beaches and a turquoise lagoon. With a population of just over 2,500, ...

When Sathyamurthy N. was young, his family and fellow villagers from Edayanchavadi, Tamil Nadu, India, would embark a few times a year on a 15-kilometer-long journey to a sacred forest in ...

Just before 10:10 on a warm summer night in 1917, German soldiers loaded a new type of armament into their artillery and began bombarding enemy lines near Ypres in Belgium. The shells, each emblazoned ...

The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango ...

Congratulations to Nick Rahaim for winning the second place award in the Outstanding Feature Story, Small category at the 22nd Annual SEJ Awards for Reporting on the Environment. As I coiled rope on ...

One autumn afternoon in 1993, Amy Simon’s mother brought home a VHS tape of Free Willy, the boy-meets-whale tale that became a sleeper hit across North America that summer. Living in the tiny ...

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 ...