We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it.

The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.

A modern-day treasure hunt.

On the meaning of an ancient practice: collecting seashells.

Fishing gear can pose a deadly threat to whales—and to those who try to save them.

The mystery of the Brillante Virtuoso.

The life cycle of a drilling platform.

A shipwreck, a mythical creature.

The ‘repo men’ of the high seas.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales vanished from the ocean. The mystery is not who killed them, but why.

Encounters with the sea.

On the Texas-sized trash island floating in the Pacific.