The Cook Islands’ main harbor is a small indentation in the island of Rarotonga, which is the most developed of the nation’s 15 islands, yet still the kind of place where you give directions in mango ...

Writer and fly fisher Roderick Haig-Brown dreamed of a time when the North Pacific Ocean would grow a lot more salmon. Haig-Brown was probably the most famous and influential fly fisher in North ...

The female beaver laying on a table in the exam room was nearly comatose, her whiskered face and nimble paws twitching with seizures. Bethany Groves, the attending wildlife veterinarian, had seen ...

Our boat noses into the craggy, primordial shore of Hecate Island. The first two off the deck have their hand lenses out before the rest of us touch land. They are Randal Mindell and Dan Tucker, both ...

Just before 10:10 on a warm summer night in 1917, German soldiers loaded a new type of armament into their artillery and began bombarding enemy lines near Ypres in Belgium. The shells, each emblazoned ...

The ocean has a way of upending expectations. Four-story-high rogue waves peak and collapse without warning. Light bends across the surface to conjure chimeric cities that hover at the horizon. And ...

She comes winging in from behind us, looming into our field of vision, seeming almost too massive to be airborne. She is a white-tailed eagle, one of a species of sea eagles. Haliaeetus albicilla is a ...

RAM! The bright red hull of the US Coast Guard icebreaker Glacier slammed onto the ice. Every rivet of the 95-meter-long ship shuddered with the impact. It was 1985, and the researchers aboard were ...

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 ...

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 ...

Marcos Ruiz is lying face down in the mud, legs splayed and one arm sunk up to his shoulder in a narrow hole. When he finally grabs the crab burrowing in the hole, he pushes himself out with his other ...

Aboard the Alkor, a 55-meter oceanographic vessel anchored in the Baltic Sea several kilometers from the German port city of Kiel, engineer Henrik Schönheit grips a joystick-like lever in his fist. He ...