Planet Earth used to be something like a cross between a deep freeze and a car crusher. During vast stretches of the planet’s history, everything from pole to pole was squashed beneath a blanket of ...

Ready-to-eat shrimp rings have had their fair share of mud thrown at them. Over the years, social justice and environmental crusaders have pointed out the problems with these cheap mainstays of ...

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 ...

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 ...

When I was small, my ǧáǧṃ́p (grandfather) would set about the serious business of food gathering with my cousins and me in the late spring. Everyone in the family had a role in our food harvests and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Back when Ireland still had lighthouse keepers, the town of Dingle had a watchful one. Paddy Ferriter was a man who preferred the company of his dogs to that of most people. Through the autumn and ...

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 ...

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 ...