Oceans News

At 5 p.m. on February 10, at least 30 residents of Chellanam, a coastal village near Kochi in central Kerala, gathered on the side of the village road. The group…

“Vizhinjam was once known as the harbour of pro-creation,” Father Michael, parish priest of Lady of Good Voyage Church in Vizhinjam, Kerala, told Mongabay-India. But today, the reality is different.…

Aquaculture is a rapidly expanding sector globally, with India being the second-largest producer of aquaculture resources and contributing approximately 6.3% to global aquaculture production. The state of West Bengal, with…

It was a calm October night over Sri Lanka’s northern seas, the silence broken only by the sound of a rapidly approaching motorboat from India. In Kalpitiya, a town further…

New human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants constantly enter production across the world even as many thousands of these chemicals are already circulating throughout the planet. There's so many, in fact,…

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought sweeping changes to lifestyles, it also altered an important but seldom thought-of aspect of human existence – trash. The pandemic has drastically changed the types and…

In an effort to protect the dugong, the Tamil Nadu government declared 500 sq. km of the biodiversity-rich waters in the Gulf of Mannar and Palk Bay, where the marine…

Most of the sandy beaches and bays of Goa, India’s smallest state, are dominated by tourism and fishing. Yet in the low tide pools along the a 100 km long…

Tropical storms, in the last 21 years, have had an overall positive impact on the ability of mangroves in India to fix carbon dioxide, a key climate-warming greenhouse gas, says…

India is estimated to have a potential of around 54 gigawatts (GW) of ocean energy – tidal power (12.45 GW) and wave power (41.3 GW) – but it is yet…

One hot 2019 afternoon in Lakshadweep, as marine mammal scientist Divya Panicker sat engrossed in listening to recordings retrieved from underwater sound recorders, she came across low blue whale moans,…

Until recently, Kerala’s coastal population had every reason to rejoice the arrival of the monsoon in the state. Apart from numerous good fishing hauls, the important celebratory moments like weddings…

For the past two decades, the catch and trade of seahorses has been banned in India. However, a new study reveals that 13 million seahorses are estimated to have been…

Sediment cores harvested from beneath the seafloor in the Bay of Bengal, off the Indian coast, have uncovered that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and related warming were “major players” in…

More than a month has passed since cyclone Yaas hit the eastern coast in May this year, impacting parts of Odisha, West Bengal, and Jharkhand. Improvement in cyclone prediction system…

Similar to some other countries such as China, the quest for minerals in the deep sea has been on India’s radar for some time now. Recently, in June 2021, it…

A resident of Androth island in Lakshadweep, Muhammed Hambdulla Syed, says that the islands are facing an environmental disaster. “Our forefathers landed here centuries ago but the local community has…

India is a mega-biodiverse nation. It is home to 7-8% of the recorded species of the world. Its marine ecosystems are equally biodiverse: of the 32 animal phyla known to…

Lakshadweep resident and researcher R.M. Hidayathulla, who drew attention to the disappearance of a small, uninhabited atoll island in the archipelago in the Arabian Sea in 2017, has closely witnessed…

Beneath the current crisis that is brewing in the Lakshadweep, there is another unspoken crisis unfolding that threatens the very habitability of the islands, and calls into question the fevered…