Articles
08/2024
Black maritime archaeologists like Gabrielle Miller find both healing and terror as they excavate shipwrecks from the transatlantic slave trade.
01/2024
The new freezing technique could reinvigorate corals suffering from warming oceans—or even preserve human organs in the future.
07/2022
PBS NewsHour: Coral reefs around the world are in growing danger due to rising temperatures connected with climate change. But in Florida and the Caribbean, marine biologists are racing to fight a new deadly threat. Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports.
06/2016
The device is so easy to use, researchers are asking for a “squidpop blitz” for World Oceans Day.
by Laurie M. Penland
05/2016
More than 315 billion pounds of plastic pollute our oceans, including the Great Pacific trash vortex, a vast patch of plastic debris that some estimates calculate as being twice the size of the continental United States.
by Alex di Giovanni
10/2014
Smithsonian photographer Laurie Penland details the exhausting, but rewarding, work of scraping invasive species off the hull of a boat.
by Laurie M Penland
05/2011
Laurie Penland has been diving for 19 years, six of them as a diving officer for the Smithsonian Institution, and yet last September she witnessed something she never had before: a plastic invasion.
by Megan Gambino
05/2011
It blew in for two solid days: a flotilla of plastic forks, soda bottles, rubber gloves, and other refuse.
12/2009
Understanding how corals reproduce is critical to their survival; Smithsonian's Nancy Knowlton investigates the annual event.
by Megan Gambino
