For the past few months, I have been reporting on the nascent deep-sea mining industry. Metals worth trillions of dollars lie at the bottom of the sea, and a handful of companies have been developing the technology to get them up to the surface and into electric car batteries, weapons systems and whatever else might…
Over the next month, if you take a ferry from the center of Venice to the island of Giudecca and walk into a former 15th-century convent, you will find yourself figuratively plunging underwater. The haunting songs of humpback whales will flow around you. A fish will sing its evensong from the sea grass meadows of…
Saganaga Lake was so calm that I could see boulders 10 feet below the surface. The water reflected a mirror image of the clouds above as my partner, Brian, and I paddled between earth and sky. On the horizon, a forest of white pine, spruce and cedar delineated the northern shoreline, in Canada. The border…
In 2016, a surprise decision from the Supreme Court “sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions,” Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak wrote in an investigation published last week. The one-paragraph ruling halted the Clean Power Plan, President Barack Obama’s signature environmental policy, which was aimed at reducing emissions from power…
As public health officials declared the end of a sewage contamination emergency in the Potomac River last month, scientists feared the waterway was still in distress. More than 240 million gallons of human waste had poured into the river from a broken sewer main. Researchers went out in early March to sample the water, trying…
The Environmental Protection Agency and Maryland regulators filed separate lawsuits Monday seeking to hold the Washington, D.C., public water utility responsible for at least 240 million gallons of sewage contamination that flowed into the Potomac River this winter. The utility, D.C. Water, was in the process of updating the Potomac Interceptor, a 60-year-old pipeline that…
In 2022, Jack Brand, an environmental toxicologist, loaded a bunch of Swedish fish with cocaine. He wasn’t trying to bring a Halloween hoax to life; he wanted to see how salmon in the wild reacted to pollution from the illegal drug. In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in the number of waterways…
The Senate voted on Thursday to allow mining upstream from Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, one of the largest and most visited expanses of federally protected lakes and forests in the United States. By a vote of 50 to 49, senators passed a resolution that would repeal a moratorium on new mining across more…
