Hakai Magazine

Article body copy When Arvid Pardo, a Maltese diplomat, took the floor at the United Nations General Assembly in New York in 1967 and began speaking at length on international law, the room was sparsely populated. Pardo was undeterred. The deep, dark ocean, he said, is the womb of life. “We still bear in our bodies—in our blood, in the salty bitterness of our tears—the marks of this remote past.”…

Article body copy When I first see the canoe, in May, it takes a moment to distinguish the long, shapely slab of cedar from the patch of earth that has spent more than a century trying to reclaim it. Covered in moss and ravaged by decades of slow rot, the narrow boat lay in the same spot where Indigenous Alaskans had carved it from the trunk of a western red cedar. They did this in the place wher…

Article body copy August 29, 2020, dawned clear over southwest Nova Scotia. In the cabin of his lobster boat, the Mystique Lady, Matthew Cope was chatting with the other members of his crew as they chugged out from shore. The vessel was bound for the area where Cope, a member of Millbrook First Nation, had set his 150 lobster traps the day before. Cope had prepared those traps with plastic-encase…

Article body copy Nearly 200 of us cram into Tarāwhai, a traditional wooden Māori meeting house, under the gaze of the ancestors and deities carved into the posts and walls. We’re here in the home of the Ngāti Tarāwhai tribe, in the middle of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, for the inaugural kura reo taiao gathering: five days of exploring our coasts, rivers, birds, and forests via the …

Article body copy I am sitting at a slick Manhattan waterfront restaurant on the banks of the East River, New York City, trying to decide why I find the caviar pizza on the menu so disturbing. Jonathan Haffmans, the executive chef of Industry Kitchen, is telling me how their extremely expensive signature “24K” pie is made. “First of all,” Haffmans says, “if you want it, you have to book it at lea…

Article body copy Aquaculture is big business in Canada. In 2023, open-net-pen salmon farming in British Columbia alone produced 50,000 tonnes of fish worth just over US $350-million. But on June 30, 2029, the federal government’s long-looming ban on open-net-pen salmon farming is set to take effect. On that day, 63 operations will be forced to shut down. For decades, BC’s open-net-pen salmon far…

Article body copy The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over the centuries, transforming the North Sea into an industrialized seascape. Trade has made this sea—which washes against the United Kingdom to the west and mainland Europe to the ea…

Article body copy Though reminiscent of a discarded clump of salad greens, this is actually a lettuce sea slug. I spotted it 20 meters below the surface on a coral reef off Playa Kalki, an idyllic beach on the northwestern edge of Curaçao. Bright video lights and a macrophotography camera in an underwater housing let me capture this invertebrate in all its colorful glory. Named for the undulating…

Article body copy On a brisk August morning in Tasermiut Fjord, southern Greenland, I poke my head from the hatch of my family’s 13-meter sailboat to find frost on the deck and a cloudless sky. It’s weather that demands exploring. After my husband and I haul our eight- and 10-year-old sons from bed and row the dinghy to the beach, we begin our trek up Klosterdalen, also known as Monastery Valley,…

Article body copy One of the killer whale’s most distinguishing features is its saddle patch: an area of gray or white coloration behind its dorsal fin. Each killer whale has a distinct saddle patch, just as humans have distinct fingerprints. Scientists and other observers can use these patches both to identify individuals and to differentiate one ecologically divided population from another. Res…

Article body copy Each summer, thousands of bluebottles (also known as Portuguese man-of-wars) wash up along the shores of Sydney, Australia. These remarkable relatives of jellyfish are actually colonial organisms: each is made up of four kinds of specialized, interdependent bodies called zooids. One zooid provides the gas-filled sail; when the wind catches, it whisks the bluebottle across the oc…

Lough Hyne is a marine inlet in Ireland fed by tidal currents from the Atlantic Ocean. The lough is one of the first protected marine waters in Europe, but over the years, development, pollution, and overuse has degraded the natural environment. Video by Grant Callegari For the Love of a Little Sea The birthplace of experimental marine biology is in decline. Will Ireland rally to save it?

Article body copy One of the biggest mistakes novice children’s book writers make is to assume that a story must teach something. An overt message—share, don’t be a bully, eat your veggies—can make for a boring book. There can, of course, be a lot to learn in children’s books, but it takes a deft hand to avoid being didactic. Several of this season’s marine-themed books tackle big subjects—death,…

Article body copy When I was a teenager in the mid-1990s, I had a friend whose family owned an unimproved lot on Dabob Bay, a bay off a fjord nestled deep in the southern Salish Sea, in Washington State. My group of friends, almost all of us the broke, angst-ridden, poorly supervised children of divorce, would camp there on weekends. We swam, sunbathed topless without sunscreen, smoked weed and d…

Article body copy As humanity works to slash greenhouse gas emissions and stem the pace of planetary warming, scientists, governments, and industry leaders are looking for low-carbon alternatives to fuel the future. Alongside renewables such as solar and wind energy, hydrogen gas is bubbling to the forefront as a fuel of choice—especially for energy-intensive processes like forging steel. However…

Article body copy 1. A reckoning It’s a blustery day in the autumn of 2023, and I’m standing in a roadside pullout in Northern California, looking at the past and future of the Klamath River. Immediately upstream I see Iron Gate Dam—17 stories tall, nearly four times as wide— completely blocking its red-rock canyon. There are four such dams, with Iron Gate as the first and largest, in 60 kilomete…

Jake Spink fished British Columbia’s craggy coast for four decades. Now, as the president of the British Columbia Coast Pilots—an association of highly trained captains that guide thousands of tankers, cruise ships, and other large vessels into the province’s ports ...

Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States at the end of September 2024, dumping unprecedented levels of rain. Then, just two weeks later, Hurricane Milton rapidly revved up to a Category 5 (before weakening), and shattered more rainfall records. Experts ...

When Hurricane Maria swept through the Caribbean in 2017, tiny Dominica was hit particularly hard—howling winds and torrential rain damaged or destroyed 95 percent of the country’s housing stock. Similarly, Oceans Forward, a Dominica-based conservation organization focused on community-centered projects, ...

Between March and May each year, 15 million black-legged kittiwakes gather from across the North Atlantic and Pacific Oceans to nest and breed on rocky Arctic cliffs—some making the journey from as far as Florida or North Africa. But a ...