I didn’t grow up by the ocean, but in the suburbs of New York, where plastic pollution was appearing more and more in my community. I found myself wondering where it was all coming from and where it was heading, and that question eventually led me to understand that everything is connected to the ocean and that we understand so little of what lies beneath. As someone who loves learning, I was captured by its mysteries and couldn’t believe we knew more about the moon than the seafloor. With no ocean science curriculum at my high school, I took matters into my own hands: from going to my local library to read books by oceanographers like Jacques Cousteau and Sylvia Earle, to taking notes on BBC’s Blue Planet documentaries, to getting dive certified at 16, a career in marine conservation started to feel less like a choice and more like something innate.

Fast forward, I completed my bachelor’s in Florida and a master's in marine science in a European program across Spain, France and Belgium, and noticed the same gap throughout six years of study: science had a storytelling problem. The knowledge and solutions were there, but they were rarely translated into language that reached the people who most needed to hear them.

So I started asking what we weren’t being told, and more importantly, who was already living with the consequences. The more I learned, the more clearly I saw the same pattern: those doing the least harm were paying the highest price. Indigenous peoples, BIPOC communities, frontline communities everywhere were absorbing the costs of profit and extraction in their health, their land, and their futures, while the science to tell that story clearly existed and the funding and platforms to amplify it did not.

I showed up in the rooms where decisions were being made, UN conferences, global climate summits, you name it. World leaders flew in with the same broken promise on repeat, "the time for action is now." In those same rooms, youth showed up louder than ever and Indigenous knowledge was part of the discussions, which mattered, and yet discussion is not the same as decision, and the gap between the two is where this field loses a lot of its people.

What made the burnout really set in was realizing that money is both the cause and the missing piece. Those closest to the problem are furthest from the resources, and instead of joining forces, organizations working toward the same goals often end up competing for the same limited pool of grants, which is a design flaw in the system, not a reflection of the people in it.

As a science communicator, I feel that funding gap personally. People have repeatedly assumed I work for free because I am passionate, or because the visibility is payment enough, and in many cases I have ended up supporting campaigns without compensation because I genuinely want to use my voice for the ocean. The problem is that it comes at a real cost of time, skill, and expertise that somehow gets treated as less valuable than paying Meta to run an ad on the same content. The undervaluing of science communication is not separate from the broader funding problem in conservation: it is part of the same pattern, where the people doing the translating and the bridging are expected to absorb that cost because they love what they do. And the numbers at the systemic level make that pattern even harder to sit with.

Consider what that looks like at scale. Just $1.2 billion a year currently flows to ocean protection efforts, against the $15.8 billion needed annually to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030. Around that same time, Elon Musk’s net worth crossed $1.1 trillion, making him the world’s first trillionaire, a fortune nearly four times the size of the next-largest in the world, and larger than it would take to close the entire ocean conservation funding gap many times over. Wealth concentration at that scale and conservation underfunding at this scale are not unrelated phenomena.

Corporations spent years making sure individual responsibility was the dominant narrative. Carbon footprint calculators were popularized by fossil fuel companies. Plastic pollution campaigns focused on our straws while those same companies continued producing single-use packaging at industrial scale, shifting the weight onto people instead of systems in a way that was entirely deliberate. Individual action still matters, and I will always believe that, and holding systems and those who profit from them accountable has to run alongside it as a parallel and necessary force, not a replacement for the personal but a recognition that the personal was never meant to carry this alone.

My eco-anxiety didn't come from bad headlines. It came from knowing exactly what needs to happen and watching the world choose otherwise, over and over, which is a specific kind of exhaustion that anyone working in this space probably recognizes without needing it explained. On top of that, being exposed to more information than any generation before us makes caring feel infinite, and the distance between that caring and actual systemic change can feel impossible to close.

What kept bringing me back was solutions. The ocean is genuinely full of them, and they just rarely leave the niche, rarely reach the people already doing the work who need connection more than they need another report.

The rise of ocean and climate communicators in recent years gives me real hope that our problems and our solutions are reaching more people than ever, and we need so many more skills and voices in this space: scientists, filmmakers, lawyers, designers, teachers, economists, artists, translators, community organizers, journalists, all of them. Whatever your background, whatever your skill, you are needed in this conversation.

I have spent 15 years meeting people doing extraordinary work in every corner of this field, and I cannot wait to dig into those stories here, and find the ones I haven't heard yet.

This is just the beginning of what I want to share here. More soon.

-Elizabeth

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Last month, I spent a few days at OCEANOISE 2026, a conference held just down the coast from me near Barcelona, as a science media collaborator with JPI Oceans. Much of what was presented there hasn't been published yet, so a good deal of what follows is reaching you while the science is still being written up, straight from the researchers doing the work. Noise doesn't carry the same weight in public conversation as plastic or warming water, in part because it leaves nothing behind to point at.

What I heard over those few days built a persuasive argument that human-made underwater noise is already altering how marine animals feed, move, and find one another, and the findings below are the ones that showed it most clearly.

Offshore wind noise, from seals to the base of the food web

Joseph Schnitzler and his team at the Institute for Terrestrial and Aquatic Wildlife Research spent years tracking 25 harbor seals, tagged between 2015 and 2024, as they moved in and around offshore wind farms in the North Sea. The seals weren’t avoiding the farms at all, spending up to about 8% of their time inside them, drawn by the hard structures the turbines add to an otherwise sandy seafloor, which get colonized by mussels, lift the local food web, and attract fish.

The complication is the traffic that comes with the farm, since maintenance vessels reach every turbine every few weeks and carry engine noise with them. When more than one vessel was operating nearby, the seals shifted their movements to steer clear, so the real deterrent isn’t the wind farm but the activity needed to keep it running, and with offshore wind expanding fast, the full scale of that habitat loss is still ahead of us.

PURE WIND, the project behind this work, traced wind farm sound all the way down to the plankton, where Ana Širović’s team found something more tangled than expected. Larval bivalves, diatoms, phytoplankton, and zooplankton all responded, though not uniformly, with some deterred from feeding and others stimulated, and in one case phytoplankton suffered only because the grazers that normally keep them in check were disrupted, leaving other microzooplankton free to consume them instead. “It’s kind of a complicated chain reaction,” Širović said, and with the work still being written up, what it means for the wider food web stays open.

Deep-sea mining would bring noise to a place we’ve barely seen

Klaus Lucke from Germany’s Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency was direct about how little is known, saying deep-sea mining will affect marine ecosystems but that the extent is impossible to predict because “we don’t know really what is down there.” A 2025 study in Science Advances put it starkly, finding that humans have visually explored less than 0.001% of the deep seafloor, an area roughly a tenth the size of Belgium, and yet some companies are already applying for mining permits.

He pointed to the Ziphius beaked whale, which doesn’t live in the deep sea but dives past 3,000 meters for hours to hunt and is acutely sensitive to sound, so the danger is less a physical wound than the loss of access to where it feeds. The machinery that collects polymetallic nodules runs at low frequencies, the same range fish, invertebrates, and baleen whales use to communicate, which Lucke described as a loss of “communication space,” the distance across which animals can still hear one another before they have to call louder or crowd closer together. For the invertebrates fixed to the seafloor he was blunter still, saying they “will be killed.”

41 countries now back a moratorium or precautionary pause on deep-sea mining, a number still climbing even as the International Seabed Authority, the UN body governing the deep seabed, has yet to finalize the regulations for it. Acoustic measurements aren’t even consistently required in current mining impact assessments, which means we would be adding noise to a system we can barely describe.

Off Southern California, whales are exposed to more than sonar

The US Navy is legally authorized to “take” marine mammals during training activities that generate impulsive sound, including explosive detonations and projectiles striking the water, at a tactical training range off Southern California, and understanding what that authorization permits depends on the difference between impulsive and continuous sound. Sonar is continuous, which gives an animal at least some window to detect it and respond, whereas impulsive sound from an explosion or a high-velocity projectile hitting the surface is sudden, brief, and broadband, arriving faster than an animal can react. Erin Falcone and her team at Marine Ecology and Telemetry Research have been studying exactly this through a project called BOOMIN, short for Behavioral Observations of Marine Mammals Around Impulsive Noise, deploying high-resolution acoustic tags on Ziphius beaked whales, blue whales, and fin whales in the Southern California Range Complex.

Data from 15 tagged Ziphius suggest that some impulsive sounds elicit responses much like those documented for navy sonar, including extended disruption of foraging dives, and near active navy sites these whales are exposed to around 4 impulsive detections per hour. The concern is less any single blast than the cumulative effect of that frequency of disturbance on animals that depend on hours-long deep dives to feed, especially because the researchers themselves note that the nature and extent of impulsive sound fields capable of changing whale behavior remain “virtually unknown,” a remarkable thing to still be saying about activity happening at permitted scale, in the ocean, right now.

Where the science is, and where policy isn’t

What tied all of this together was the gap between what scientists now know and what the rules recognize. Most regulation still counts noise as harmful only when an animal can no longer do something essential, like echolocate or call to others. That misses all the ways an animal copes short of that, rerouting, feeding less, burning energy on stress, and it overlooks the species that can't move away at all, like seagrass. There are early efforts to close that gap, including a proposed limit on how much of a habitat can sit above a harmful noise level each month, though the bodies that would enforce it are moving slowly and separately, clearer on the goal than on how to reach it.

Where this leaves us

What connects the offshore wind farms, the mining frontier, and the naval ranges is that the loudest harm we are doing to the ocean is largely invisible and inaudible to us, while the animals living in it register that sound continuously. The science is finally catching up to what that constant exposure costs them, and policy has not yet, which is precisely where the work now sits.

Most of what I learned came out of five projects funded through JPI Oceans, a platform coordinating ocean research across 21 countries: PURE WIND, ORCHESTRA, SONORA, DEUTERONOISE, and DIAPHONIA. For anyone who wants to go deeper than I can here, jpi-oceans.eu is the place to start.

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Science like this rarely travels beyond the conference walls, and getting it out to a wider audience, making sure our ocean is actually heard, is the work I most want to keep doing. If that's what you're here for, subscribe and stay with me, there's more on the way!

-Elizabeth

Every month on the last weekday, I look for the wins, the recoveries and the breakthroughs that remind us why protecting the ocean is worth every fight. I also bring my own lens as a marine scientist and communicator, adding context, perspective, and the bigger picture behind each one. May has been an extraordinary month. Let's get into it.

1. Scientists detect a giant squid off Australia using eDNA 🦑

Researchers from Curtin University confirmed the presence of giant squid off Western Australia’s Ningaloo coast for the first time in over 25 years, without ever seeing one. Using environmental DNA, or eDNA, genetic material animals shed through mucus feces, and skin, the team collected nearly 200 water samples from depths reaching 4,500 meters and identified 226 species, including deep-diving whales and dozens never before recorded in the region.

We only filmed the first giant squid alive in 2006, followed by recording them in their natural habitat in 2012, so we’re talking about an animal so elusive that we found its DNA in the water before we could reliably find the animal itself. eDNA is now being used far beyond the ocean too, with scientists pulling genetic traces from the air to study land animals, and even testing it inside zoos. The applications are only just beginning.

2. Cozumel’s community beat a cruise giant. For now. 🇲🇽

After over four years of legal injunctions, community petitions, and a mayor who formally refused to issue municipal permits, Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) denied the cruise terminal expansion near Cozumel’s Villa Blanca reef, citing protected species and direct proximity to the reef system. The original approval had been granted in December 2021 despite years of opposition. Mayor José Luis Chacón put it plainly: “In Cozumel, it’s the people who rule. Cozumel will first protect its environment and development.”

However, the story isn’t fully closed. SSA Mexico has filed a legal challenge to reinstate the permit, and a court has opened proceedings. What makes this fight so critical is the state of the reef itself: Cozumel recorded the steepest decline of any subregion in the entire Mesoamerican Reef in the latest health report, with living coral now covering just 16% of the seafloor. The causes are driven by a combination of disease, heat stress, and the chronic strain that high volumes of cruise ship traffic place on local water quality through inadequate wastewater treatment. Reefs reduce wave energy by up to 97%, making them one of the most powerful natural flood defenses coastal communities have. More construction, sediment, and vessel traffic will only accelerate a decline that is already well underway. The reef won this round, but the same community vigilance that got it here is what is needed to keep it.

3. North Atlantic right whales just had their best calving season in 17 years 🐋

Twenty-three calves were born during the 2026 calving season, the highest number since 2009. Thirteen of the returning mothers last calved in 2021 or 2022, marking a shorter interval between births than the recent average of 7 to 10 years, which is closer to the healthy norm of 3 to 4 years.

NOAA Fisheries estimates that 50 calves would need to be born every year for many years to stop the population’s decline. With only 70 known reproductive females, that number is biologically impossible, which means the only real path to recovery is eliminating the two leading causes of death: entanglement in fishing gear and vessel strikes. Twenty-three is cause for real hope, but it’s also a reminder that protection is the only mechanism that actually works.

4. Scotland's seabed proves that banning bottom trawling works 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Nearly a decade after Scotland’s South Arran MPA banned bottom trawling, scientists found three times more organisms and twice as many species on the protected seabed compared to nearby fished waters. In a single small sediment sample, researchers recorded more than 150 species, including spoon worms, bobbit worms, and tower snails, creatures the lead researcher called “important gardeners of the seabed” that turn over sediment and play a vital role in carbon storage.

Europe’s seabeds are the most trawled in the world, damaged by heavy fishing gear since at least the mid-14th century. The destruction has been so total that researchers had to consult historical records just to find a reference for what a healthy seabed looks like. That makes what South Arran achieved all the more remarkable, and the clearest argument yet for banning bottom trawling everywhere.

5. Papua New Guinea protects 200,000 km² of Pacific Ocean 🇵🇬

Papua New Guinea has announced the Western Manus Marine Protected Area, covering approximately 200,000 km² of Pacific waters, roughly the size of the United Kingdom, as part of the newly established Melanesian Ocean Corridor of Reserves spanning Fiji, Vanuatu, and PNG. It is the largest MPA in PNG’s history and a significant step toward the global 30x30 target.

This announcement comes alongside a crisis unfolding elsewhere in the same country. Since December 2025, communities along the east coast of New Ireland province have been reporting mass fish die-offs, skin irritations, and illness after contact with coastal waters. Possible causes under investigation include harmful algal blooms linked to warm water and agricultural runoff from palm oil plantations, and mining contaminants. Ocean health and human health are always the same conversation, and that is why ocean protection is not just for animals, but for the people living on these coasts and depending on them.

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Until next month

If someone in your life needs a reason to care about the ocean right now, send them this one.

See you in June. 💙

The story of New Orleans and rising sea levels is more complex, more unjust, and ultimately more hopeful than recent headlines suggest, and the people missing from those headlines are the ones who matter most.

Earlier this month, the Guardian published a piece stemming from a newly published study in Nature Sustainability that estimated New Orleans could be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century, without intervention. While the study does use the phrase “point of no return,” as the Guardian headlined, it also contains viable solutions that the headline left behind entirely, opting instead for a framing that enlists fear and sets an immediate expectation of moving entire communities and cultures from their homes. That choice skips the most important questions: who caused this, and who is bearing the consequences?

Louisiana’s coastline is disappearing faster than anywhere else in North America, and among the fastest on earth. Since the 1930s, the state has lost more than 2,000 square miles of land, roughly the size of Delaware, and projections suggest a similar area could follow in the next fifty years if conditions remain unchanged. While sea level rise is a significant contributor to this crisis, what headlines like the Guardian’s rarely acknowledge is arguably the biggest driver: decades of oil and gas extraction that have physically dismantled the landscape from within. To access drilling sites, the industry cut canals through Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, the very ecosystems that hold the land together. Without them, the delta compacts and subsides, storm surges travel further inland, and the coastline retreats at a pace no sea level projection alone can fully capture.

The communities bearing the weight of that retreating coastline are also missing from the headline. New Orleans is a predominantly Black city, and those most at risk from rising waters are the same people who have spent generations living alongside the industry most responsible for accelerating the damage. They have contributed least to the extractive economy that dismantled this landscape, yet they are the ones watching it disappear. That is environmental injustice in one of its clearest forms. New Orleans is not the only Louisiana community carrying that burden. Cancer Alley, the 85-mile petrochemical corridor running between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is home to some of the highest cancer incidence rates in the United States, sitting up to 47 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable threshold, with Black residents bearing the heaviest burden. These are not separate crises. They are part of the same story, across the same land.

According to the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 57% of Louisiana residents are worried about global warming, six points below the national average. That gap signals a communication and education failure around what is actually happening, why, and who is responsible. These are communities watching their coastline disappear in real time, and the coverage they are receiving is more likely to induce paralysis than to explain the forces driving the crisis or the solutions that could slow it.

To its credit, the Guardian article did surface the political failures that have compounded this crisis. The mechanisms to hold polluters accountable and fund Louisiana’s restoration have existed, yet the political will to see them through has repeatedly fallen short. A jury ordered Chevron to pay $740 million for their role in Louisiana’s coastal damage, before the Supreme Court gave them a way out. Separately, $3 billion from BP’s Deepwater Horizon settlement had been secured specifically for the restoration that decades of extraction made necessary, channelled into the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion Project, a plan designed to redirect the Mississippi River’s natural sediment flow to rebuild more than 20 square miles of wetlands over fifty years.

Governor Jeff Landry cancelled it in 2025, claiming it would “break” Louisiana’s culture by disrupting oyster fisheries and citing ballooning costs, despite $618 million already spent and construction already underway. Supporters noted that while the project would affect roughly one third of Louisiana’s oyster fishery in the short term, serious long-term losses were not projected. $53 million had been set aside to support affected fishers through the transition, and without the diversion project those same fisheries face decimation anyway as land loss and saltwater intrusion accelerate.

Torbjörn Törnqvist, who leads the Nature Sustainability study, has been clear that scrapping these river sediment diversion projects only worsens the challenge, and his co-author Jesse Keenan has noted that restoration efforts could have bought the region valuable time. Törnqvist himself has said he has no plans to leave New Orleans, and that this is not something happening in the next ten years. What the study calls for is not panic, but an organized, long-term plan that invests in coastal restoration to buy time, while beginning to prepare communities for a future that may eventually require some managed transition. That is not a small thing to lose to a political calculation.

What also disappeared when relocation became the headline is a detail the study itself explicitly acknowledges: the timing of multi-metre sea level rise remains uncertain, and the researchers describe targeted coastal restoration as a viable adaptation strategy that could buy time for any future transition, rather than inviting chaos. That uncertainty is not a reason for complacency, rather a reason to act now, and the solutions already exist.

Across southeast Louisiana, restoration is underway:

• Common Ground Relief has been planting native marsh grasses, cypress trees, and irises across twelve parishes since 2007, restoring over 41 miles of linear shoreline in 2023 alone.

• The Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana brings volunteers into the marshes to plant thousands of grass plugs, rebuilding the shoreline root by root.

• Pontchartrain Conservancy has restored over 420 acres of wetlands and planted more than 110,000 trees across the Pontchartrain Basin since 1989, working alongside these same organizations through the Central Wetlands Reforestation Collective to reforest critical swampland near New Orleans.

The path forward requires phasing out the fossil fuel extraction that has degraded this coastline for generations, making polluters pay for the damage their infrastructure caused, and investing seriously in the nature-based solutions that are already proving their worth. If relocation does become part of this story for some communities, it must be rooted in a bottom up approach, with adequate resources and funding to support communities through it. Until the right people are held accountable and nature-based solutions receive the investment they require, relocating communities elsewhere addresses the symptom while the cause continues unchecked.

New Orleans is not already lost, it is being failed, and the difference between those two things is everything. Tell the world it is already lost and no politician will fight for it, no investor will fund restoration, and no community will be given the resources to lead their own future. Change the narrative, put people first, and center the solutions that science tells us are still within reach, and everything changes.

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I attended the Ocean Visions Biennial Summit as a speaker and left with five innovations that genuinely stuck with me, plus a bonus one still being debated. From coral reefs to the Arctic, these solutions are all connected to Ocean Visions through their conferences or Launchpad program, a free accelerator connecting ocean-climate innovators with scientists and engineers.

1. The Device Feeding Starving Corals at Night

You might have heard the popular fact that coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor yet support roughly 25% of all marine species. But when seawater temperatures rise by just 1-2°C for a matter of days or weeks, corals expel their symbiotic algae, turn white, and enter a state of starvation known as bleaching (not yet death). With the ongoing 2023-2025 global bleaching event confirmed as the worst on record, finding ways to help corals survive is more urgent than ever.

One of the solutions that stuck with me most came from Andrea Grottolli at Ohio State University. Her team developed UZELA, an autonomous solar-powered underwater device that switches on at night for one hour to concentrate local zooplankton around coral reefs, giving starving corals a critical feeding boost. Field trials show UZELA increases local zooplankton concentrations sevenfold and boosts coral feeding rates by 10 to 50-fold. A 2025 follow-up study found that combining UZELA with 3D printed settlement modules doubles survivorship and quadruples growth of coral recruits. It won’t stop climate change, but it could buy corals precious time.

2. Turning a Beach Nuisance into a Climate Solution

Sargassum is a naturally occurring brown seaweed that floats across the Atlantic providing habitat for sea turtles, fish and other marine life. But due to climate change, shifts in ocean currents, and increasing nutrient pollution, its populations have exploded in recent decades. Today it washes ashore in massive quantities, smelling of sulfur and closing down beaches from Mexico to Barbados.

While sargassum is a remarkable carbon absorber, it releases that stored carbon back as methane, one of the most potent greenhouse gases, when it rots ashore. Harvesting it before it reaches shore could change that entirely.

Ocean Visions’ Launchpad supports Seafields, which grows sargassum on offshore farms, processes it into food and fertilizer, and sinks the remaining carbon-rich biomass to the ocean floor for long-term sequestration. A growing number of startups are exploring ways to turn this beach nuisance into products, materials and carbon credits. A problem washing up on our beaches could become part of the solution.

3. How Kelp is Transforming Coastal Economies

Our ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of all human CO2 emissions, acting as a critical climate buffer. But as fossil fuel use continues to drive atmospheric CO2 higher, that absorption comes at a cost: the ocean acidifies, stripping the calcium carbonate that shellfish and crustaceans need to build their shells and exoskeletons. Maine supplies 80% of the country’s lobster, and the Gulf of Maine has warmed faster than 99% of oceans worldwide. This is an existential threat to an entire coastal economy.

Atlantic Sea Farms was founded specifically to address this. By partnering with local fishers to grow kelp in the lobster off-season, they’re creating a second income stream while sequestering carbon, which in turn supports efforts to reduce ocean acidification. They’re also turning that harvested kelp into products you can actually eat: fermented seaweed salad, kelp smoothie cubes, kimchi and sauerkraut. With the global seaweed extract market projected to reach $20.9 billion by 2029, Atlantic Sea Farms is well positioned to scale.

4. Turning CO2 into Rock on the Ocean Floor

We just mentioned how the ocean is one of our greatest climate allies, absorbing CO2 at scale. But as 2024 became the first calendar year on record to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, scientists are asking: what if we could deliberately speed that process up and store that carbon permanently?

Solid Carbon, a project by Ocean Networks Canada, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere using direct air capture on an offshore floating platform and pumps it over 300 meters below the seafloor, where it permanently mineralizes into stone. The pilot targets 10,000 tons with potential to scale to 1 million tons per year. This is not a replacement for cutting emissions, but under every viable climate scenario the IPCC confirms large-scale carbon removal is also necessary. Ocean Visions’ Launchpad supports Captura and Banyu Carbon, two companies pushing this toolkit further. Together they represent approaches that barely existed five years ago.

5. Enhancing the Ocean’s Most Ancient Carbon Removal System

Carbon absorption is also happening at the most microscopic level. Phytoplankton absorb CO2 as they grow, and when they die, a portion sinks to the deep ocean storing that carbon for hundreds to thousands of years. Scientists are now researching how to enhance this ancient process through ocean iron fertilization, one of several marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) approaches and a core research pillar of Ocean Visions.

The technique adds small amounts of iron to regions like the Southern Ocean and parts of the North Pacific, where phytoplankton growth is held back by a lack of it. Simple in theory, but the practice risks disrupting marine food webs if not done carefully. Ocean Visions is partnering with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on active field trials. If key risks are addressed, this could remove up to one gigaton of CO2 per year.

Bonus: Can We Refreeze the Arctic? (Still Being Debated)

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, meaning less sunlight reflected back into space, more heat absorbed, and a feedback loop accelerating warming everywhere else.

At the 2023 Summit, Kelly Wanser of SilverLining presented a fascinating and controversial idea: spreading tiny hollow glass bubbles over sea ice to increase its reflectivity and slow melting, an approach researched by the Arctic Ice Project. In October 2022 a peer-reviewed paper argued it could backfire. Two months later, a controlled experiment showed a 33% reduction in ice melt. The Arctic Ice Project announced they would wind down due to funding challenges and the need for further ecotoxicological testing. Nonetheless, they published a direct rebuttal in 2025, standing by their results. The science remains unresolved.

Ocean Visions has since published a first-of-its-kind interactive road map identifying 21 potential approaches to prolong Arctic sea ice, and awarded $2.5 million in research grants in early 2026.

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I attended the Ocean Visions Biennial Summit 2023 to speak about the power of impact storytelling, but I left with a completely new perspective on the scale and ambition of ocean-climate innovation already underway.

With Ocean Month approaching in June, I found myself going back through my notes and realizing these solutions are more urgent and more advanced than most people know. If that summit taught me anything, it’s that the solutions are already being built. We just need more people to show up for them.

I created a Positive Ocean News series on Instagram and occasionally LinkedIn a while back, but I never stayed consistent with it, and short captions and quick reels never quite had enough room for everything I wanted to share. Today, that changes.

Every month I will be going deeper, adding the context, the science, and the personal reflections as a marine conservationist and communicator that do not fit in a carousel or a 60-second video.

Hope for the ocean exists, and we need more of it. Welcome to the first edition, dropping every last weekday of the month:

1. England finally enforces its own MPAs 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

Four Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) off the Sussex coast have had bottom trawling officially banned. And yes, this should have already been the case.

Something that frustrates a lot of people working in ocean conservation is that MPA designation has never automatically meant protection. Across Europe, huge numbers of marine protected areas have continued to allow industrial bottom trawling for years, earning the nickname “paper MPAs.” If you watched Ocean with David Attenborough recently, you saw with your own eyes what bottom trawling actually does to a seafloor: flattened corals, destroyed habitat, and clouds of sediment where life used to be. The idea that this practice was happening inside protected areas should make anyone angry.

That’s why this Sussex ban is one of the first real steps toward changing that in UK waters, and campaigners hope it opens the door for the 40+ other offshore MPAs where trawling is still permitted. Progress is slow, but it’s progress!

🔗 BBC News

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2. The largest and oldest coral ever recorded was just found in the deep sea 🪸

A coral colony stretching roughly 1,357 square meters (14,500 square feet) has been discovered near the Mariana Islands, making it the largest and oldest individual coral on record. Scientists estimate it to be over 2,050 years old, alive long before the industrial revolution, before plastic, before any of the things currently threatening its shallow-water relatives.

What gets me about discoveries like this is that we keep finding things that rewrite what we thought we knew. There is almost certainly something even more extraordinary down there we have not reached yet. Less than 25% of the ocean floor has been mapped in high resolution, and every expedition into the deep returns with something that surprises us, reminding us how much there is to protect. The Mariana Islands region is also one of the areas increasingly threatened by deep sea mining interests, making this finding all the more urgent.

🔗 NOAA Ocean Service

3. Ghana establishes its first ever MPA 🇬🇭

Ghana has officially designated its first MPA, covering coastal waters critical for both biodiversity and the fishing communities who depend on them. Built in partnership with Blue Ventures using a community-led model, this MPA puts local fishers genuinely at the center of the process rather than working around them.

This one also matters in a bigger context. The global 30x30 target, protecting 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030, is one of the most important conservation commitments on the table right now, and every new MPA counts toward it. Ghana’s coastline supports one of West Africa’s most significant artisanal fishing sectors, and bottom-up conservation that ties ocean health directly to people’s livelihoods is exactly the kind of model the world needs more of.

🔗 Blue Ventures

4. Indonesia is using open-source data to protect the Coral Triangle 🇮🇩

Indonesia has become the first country to roll out MERMAID nationally, a free cloud-based coral reef monitoring platform developed by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The Coral Triangle holds around 76% of the world’s coral species and supports the food security of approximately 120 million people across the region.

I dived in Indonesia in late 2024 and it was hands down the most colorful, biodiverse underwater environment I have experienced in my 15+ years of diving. It is also visibly threatened by dynamite fishing, coastal development, and pollution. Seeing a platform like this roll out nationwide is inspiring because it brings researchers and approximately 5,000 coastal communities together with a common set of data to make better decisions from.

🔗 MERMAID

5. California just made a historic investment in its ocean 🌊

California just committed over $6 million to ocean restoration covering kelp forest recovery, seagrass restoration, coastal resilience, and marine wildlife, following a major ocean health assessment. California's kelp forests have declined up to 95% in some regions over the past decade, driven by marine heatwaves and the collapse of sunflower sea star populations due to sea star wasting disease.

California is also one of the leading US states pushing toward the 30x30 target for its own waters. State governments treating ocean health as infrastructure rather than an afterthought is still rare enough that when it happens, it is worth celebrating.

🔗 Office of Governor Gavin Newsom

6. New evolutionary branch discovered in the deep Pacific 🔬

Scientists recently discovered 24 previously unknown creatures in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, a vast stretch of seabed roughly 4,000 meters below the surface. Among them were amphipods with long, spindly legs, others with large claws suggesting they prey on animals living in the mud, and one entirely new superfamily representing a previously unknown evolutionary lineage. One researcher compared it to discovering dogs when you already knew cats and bears existed.

This same zone is also one of the most commercially sought-after areas on Earth for deep-sea mining. A 2025 study found that a commercial mining test there reduced animal abundance by 37% within the machine’s tracks. We’re having serious policy conversations about industrially extracting parts of the seafloor we haven’t even finished cataloging, which makes the stakes hard to ignore.

🔗 Mongabay — Pacific

7. Sperm whales organize their clicks like vowels in human speech 🐋

New research has found that sperm whale click sequences, called codas, contain reusable sound units structured in a way that parallels how vowels function in human language. The whales appear to combine a finite set of units in different arrangements to produce a wide range of distinct signals.

Sperm whales have the largest brain of any animal on Earth, and every study that looks closely at their communication finds something new. I am planning to attend the OCEANOISE 2026 Conference in Spain next month, where researchers are presenting the latest science on how marine animals communicate and how ocean noise pollution is affecting them. Expect a lot more on this topic from me soon!

🔗 Royal Society — Proceedings B

Until next month

It’s easy to get lost in the bad news when it dominates the headlines. But stories like these exist every single month, and that is exactly why I am here to find them.

Next month I'm sharing some stories I have been sitting on for a while including conference reflections, Deep Dives, and of course the May edition of Positive Ocean News.

So if someone in your life needs a reason to care about the ocean right now, send them this one.

See you in May! 💙

Elizabeth