They didn’t think much of the first dead whale. Dwarfed by the rugged cliffs of Patagonia’s high green fjords, the team of biologists had sailed into a gulf off the Pacific Ocean searching for the ...

Logs the size of telephone poles drift along the shore of the Salish Sea. Erik Hammond turns the wheel of his aluminum skiff and closes in. He grabs his ax and towlines, then leaps atop the floating ...

Congratulations to J. B. MacKinnon on winning the Jack Webster Award for “Best Feature Story–Print” for this article. In most weather, you would never know that the Comox Glacier loomed above the town ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

At low tide, Hélène Sonko wades through the muddy mangrove forest surrounding the town of Joal-Fadiout, in the Saloum river delta of western Senegal. A salty breeze whistles from the Atlantic Ocean as ...

Someone approaching the shores of Utah’s bleached-out and odiferous Great Salt Lake for the first time might be inclined to call it dead. This is not the case. Only half of it is at death’s door. The ...

Gray clouds hang low over the Trondheim Fjord, a huge, convoluted indentation in the central Norwegian coast. A gusting wind blows the tops off the waves, tosses rain in my face, and fills Braute’s ...

A bird descends through the falling snow above the mountains of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Its plumage is a near perfect match of the leaden clouds above. About the size of an American robin, ...

When Culum Brown was a young boy, he and his grandmother frequented a park near her home in Melbourne, Australia. He was fascinated by the park’s large ornamental pond wriggling with goldfish, ...