Ocean

Story Stream

This Is Why I Go Diving With Sharks July 01, 2024

There are shadows lurking, circling us. Known for remorseless eyes and staggered rows of razor-sharp teeth, these silhouettes carry a lethal reputation.In the ring of turquoise blue, you can barely make out the grey, jagged shapes in the underwater h...

The Year of the Orca January 03, 2024

On the night of May 4th, the skipper Werner Schaufelberger was sailing the Swiss yacht Champagne toward a Spanish port town on the Strait of Gibraltar when he heard a loud rumble. His first thought was that the boat had hit something, but he quickly ...

Submersion Journalism June 21, 2023

I can’t swim and I’m afraid of the ocean, and I was about to dive to two thousand feet in a home-built amateur submersible in the hope of spotting a giant sixgill shark feed from a slurry of fish and goat viscera that the amateur-submersible builder ...

Return to The Sea October 14, 2019

Traveling the Indus valley late in the third millennium BC you would have been awed by two Bronze Age megacities, 320 miles apart, ‘massive and tightly planned, very similar in layout’, their bricks and measures standardized, evidence of rigid author...

Rewards of a Seaside Vacation August 25, 2017

A lyrical ode to the ocean's invitation to self-transcendence from the grand dame of Transcendentalism......

Seaside Stories January 29, 2017

Piers are to English seaside resorts as boardwalks are to American beaches, but instead of paralleling the water they poke out at right-angles from the shore. These tall, many-girdered structures house vendors of everything from ice-cream, to tropica...

How Octopuses Are Like Aliens December 30, 2016

In The New York Times Book Review this week, Carl Safina reviews “Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith....