Long reads

The Steller’s sea eagle is one of the largest and most aggressive raptors in the world. With an 8-foot wingspan and striking white markings, these birds tower over their bald eagle cousins. Steller’s are sublime, but they aren’t beautiful in the way people often sentimentalize animals. Most adult Steller’s survived by beating their weaker sibling to death in the nest within weeks of birth and were rewarded for their aggression by nurturing parents. No wonder they can fight off brown bears and hunt on the sea ice of the Russian Arctic. Since mid-2020, one individual Steller’s sea eagle has drawn national media attention because of the vast distances it has traveled – from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula to Alaska, then to Texas, eastern Canada, New England, and most recently, a reported sighting on May 2, 2023 in Newfoundland – and the extreme lengths to which birders are going to glimpse it. Biologists have learned remarkable th...

As winds and waves from Typhoon Merbok devastated communities along the coast of Western Alaska in 2022, Reppi Swan Sr.’s phone began to ring at Kivalina, a barrier island 80 miles above the Arctic Circle. A neighboring family had lost 3 feet of land to the rumbling lagoon, and their home was now sitting just 6 feet from the angry water’s edge. Reppi called his brother Joe Swan Jr. and quickly slid into his insulated rain gear. As a volunteer first responder, Reppi plans for emergencies like this. He and his wife, Dolly, had been patrolling the island for dangerous erosion every few hours during the storm. To prepare, he had already inspected the city’s heavy equipment and located a pile of boulders left over from a recent construction project. Working through the rain, Reppi delivered boulders to the threatened home. With their cousin Carl Swan serving as a spotter, Joe carefully arranged the boulders with a backhoe to stabilize the bank. It would hold at lea...

Deep below the ocean surface, the light fades into a twilight zone where whales and fish migrate and dead algae and zooplankton rain down from above. This is the heart of the ocean’s carbon pump, part of the natural ocean processes that capture about a third of all human-produced carbon dioxide and sink it into the deep sea, where it remains for hundreds of years. There may be ways to enhance these processes so the ocean pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere to help slow climate change. Yet little is known about the consequences. Peter de Menocal, a marine paleoclimatologist and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discussed ocean carbon dioxide removal at a recent TEDxBoston: Planetary Stewardship event. In this interview, he dives deeper into the risks and benefits of human intervention and describes an ambitious plan to build a vast monitoring network of autonomous sensors in the ocean to help humanity understand the impact. First, what is ocean carbon...