From the moment my mom gave me goggles—when I was about 3 years old—I’ve been studying the wondrous world under water. As a child, we spent the summers in Spain, and I would…

I think that for some people,” says Peter Girguis, a deep-sea microbial physiologist at Harvard University, “the ocean seems passé—that the days of Jacques Cousteau are behind…

The idea that our oceans are dangerous and unpredictable runs from The Odyssey to The Perfect Storm to Seinfeld. But in another sense, the ocean is remarkably stable and rhythmic.…

In 1984 I was on an expedition outside the barrier reef in New Caledonia, an archipelago 750 miles east of Australia. The expedition was formed to study the daily migrations of the…

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was planning the invasion of Normandy, he made sure to check with Walter Munk and his colleagues first. Munk had come to the United States from Austria-Hungary…

Early in the morning on Sept. 11, 1995, the cruise liner the Queen Elizabeth 2, on its way from Southampton to New York, was being lashed by the tail end of Hurricane Luis, somewhere…

In the current documentary, Mission Blue, about the environmental fate of the oceans, filmmaker James Cameron calls Sylvia Earle the “Joan of Arc of the seas.” That’s not the…