The 56-meter sailing yacht Bayesian sank early Monday morning in severe weather while at anchor off the coast of Sicily. The yacht is believed to have been struck by a waterspout. There were 22 passengers and crew aboard when the … Continue reading
Category Archives: Current
The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) said Wednesday that a juvenile humpback whale swimming and breaching in Boston Harbor may cause minor delays to ferry service through Thursday, August 15. CBSNews reports that the 2-year-old whale, estimated to be between 35 … Continue reading
Last week, US Coast Guard Vice Commandant Adm. Kevin Lunday spoke at the Brookings Institution and addressed the service’s enlisted force’s ongoing 10 percent manning shortage. Entering the fiscal year, the Coast Guard was about 3,000 members short of end strength … Continue reading
Boaty McBoatface, referred to as the UK’s most famous robot, recently returned to Scotland after 55 days on a more-than-2,000km undersea scientific odyssey from Iceland, studying the pace of climate change. BBC reports that the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) was hunting … Continue reading
Containers caught fire and exploded on the 6,589 TEU YM Mobility today at around 1:40 PM, local time, while berthed at the Port of Ningbo, China. A statement by Yang Ming, the ship’s operator, said that preliminary findings suggest that … Continue reading
In a new study, published in the journal Nature, scientists say that sea surface temperatures over the past decade in and around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef are the highest on record for 400 years. The study concludes that these increased temperatures, … Continue reading
Hurricane Debby brought high winds and storm surge as it traveled up and ultimately came ashore on the Gulf Coast of Florida. It also washed packages of cocaine worth more than $1 million ashore in Islamorada in the Florida Keys, … Continue reading
Most of the 2024 Summer Olympic Games have been held in Paris. The surfing competition, however, took place some 9,800 miles from Paris in the French Polynesian island of Tahiti. NPR reports that while Brazil’s Tatiana Weston-Webb and Costa Rica’s … Continue reading
In January, we posted about an iceberg designated A23a, the world’s largest, which had begun to drift on the Antarctic Circumpolar Current into “iceberg alley.” As it drifted, it was being eroded by waves and melting in the relatively warmer … Continue reading
A team of Polish divers discovered the wreck of a 19th-century vessel laden with about 100 sealed bottles of champagne. The shipwreck is in the Baltic Sea in 60 meters of water about 20 nautical miles south of the Swedish … Continue reading
About half the oxygen we breathe comes from the ocean. It was long presumed that this oceanic oxygen was produced by photosynthesis, the process by which green plants use sunlight to synthesize foods by absorbing carbon dioxide and water, emitting … Continue reading
Yesterday, we posted about the sinking of the British sailing yacht Bonhomme William last week, following an attack by orcas in the Strait of Gibraltar. Fortunately, the crew were rescued without injury. Two days later, a sperm whale encountered a … Continue reading
The mystifying attacks on sailboats by a pod of Iberian orcas continue. The crew of the British yacht Bonhomme William had to be rescued after an orca sank their vessel in the Strait of Gibraltar, according to Spanish authorities. It … Continue reading
Robert L. Allen, who definitively told the story of 50 Black sailors who were convicted of conspiracy to commit mutiny for refusing to continue to load munitions onto cargo ships after explosions had blown apart two ships at a California … Continue reading
The Hawai‘i Department of Transportation (HDOT) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) to permanently remove the historic ship Falls of Clyde from Honolulu Harbor, where it has languished since 2008. Bids must be submitted by September 25, 2024. The … Continue reading
The wreckage of the MV Noongah, dubbed “one of the nation’s worst post-war maritime disasters” has been discovered off the coast of Australia’s New South Wales 55 years after it sank in heavy weather with the loss of 21 of … Continue reading
A humpback whale that appeared to be lunge feeding breached the water and landed on a recreational boat near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, capsizing the vessel and tossing two occupants into the water, the United States Coast Guard said. … Continue reading
Have you heard of cocaine bear? Well, meet cocaine sharks. Sharks living off the coast of Brazil have tested positive for cocaine, according to new research, the first time that the drug has been detected in free-ranging sharks. Scientists tested 13 … Continue reading
RRS Discovery is a barque-rigged auxiliary steamship built for Antarctic research. She was the last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built in the United Kingdom. Her first mission was the British National Antarctic Expedition, carrying Robert Falcon Scott and … Continue reading
Just over a year after the ill-fated Titan expedition to the Titanic killed five people, another expedition down to one of the most famous shipwrecks in the world is underway. Using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), a team of imaging experts, … Continue reading