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Help us wish Dr. Sylvia Earle a happy birthday!

 
On August 30th, we celebrate Her Deepness Dr. Sylvia Earle’s birthday, and we’re excited to invite you to contribute to her gift! In honor of Dr. Earle, a Mission Blue board director has generously offered to help raise $100,000 for Mission Blue by matching your contributions dollar for dollar! 
Dr. Earle inspires us all with her youthful curiosity and enduring passion for the “blue heart of the planet.” She has truly dedicated her life to exploring and protecting the ocean and the miraculous creatures it sustains. What better gift could we give her than supporting her wish to explore and protect Hope Spots around the globe?
Please open your big blue heart and join us in wishing Sylvia Earle the happiest birthday ever!…

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Coral Reef Recovery in Fiji

By: Victor Bonito, Director, Reef Explorer Fiji

Over the last three years, coral reefs worldwide have suffered unprecedented damage to coral communities from abnormally warm seawater temperatures. When the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the third global coral bleaching event in October 2015, shallow reef areas along Fiji’s Coral Coast had already experienced two back-to-back years of widespread coral bleaching. Before we received the depressing news about our local reefs, we decided to take action and incorporate lessons learned from previous bleaching events and seawater temperature monitoring efforts.
In late 2015, our  Reef Explorer project team and local youth clubs established five new coral nurseries across our local reefs. We stocked the nurseries with a good diversity of coral species propagated from numerous donor colonies that we suspected had good thermal (heat) tolerance due to their size and placement on the reef. …

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Industrialization of the Ocean

By Michael Stocker,  bioacoustician and founder of Ocean Conservation Research – a research and policy development organization focused on the impacts of anthropogenic noise on marine habitat. For more information on industrial noise see www.ocean-noise.com

While the specter of seabed mining is one of the more recent assaults on the ocean, it is a practice that falls under the longer-running and larger rubric of the industrialization of the sea.
The ocean is a difficult – even hostile work environment. The surface is only occasionally calm. Due to the darkness of depth and turbidity visibility is all but obscured. Salt water is corrosive; and as operations submerge ever deeper they are subject to crushing hydro-static pressures. But advances in materials, processes, and communication technologies are opening up vast areas of the sea that have heretofore been out of reach and un-tappable.…

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Second Century Stewardship in US National Parks

David Shaw, the founding chair of the Sargasso Sea Alliance (a Mission Blue partner) and conservation filmmaker, has recently released a documentary titled Second Century Stewardship: Science beyond the Scenery in Acadia National Park. The film has come out on the occasion of the historic 2016 centennial celebrations of Acadia National Park and the US National Park Service. Mr. Shaw serves as a Trustee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Park Foundation.

Second Century Stewardship is a hopeful, forward-looking film that examines what science-based stewardship looks like in Acadia and beyond in this second century of the national parks system. Mr. Shaw remarks, “This collaboration is intended to more powerfully engage science in America’s national parks to benefit park stewardship and to encourage public engagement in science through park experiences.”…

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Deep Sea Mining: An Invisible Land Grab

 
By Dr. Sylvia Earle, Founder of Mission Blue

Thousands of meters beneath the azure ocean waters in places like the South Pacific, down through a water column saturated with life and to the ocean floor carpeted in undiscovered ecosystems, machines the size of small buildings are poised to begin a campaign of wholesale destruction. I wish this assessment was hyperbole, but it is the reality we find ourselves in today.
After decades of being on the back burner owing to costs far outweighing benefits, deep sea mining is now emerging as a serious threat to the stability of ocean systems and processes that have yet to be understood well enough to sanction in good conscience their large-scale destruction.
Critical to evaluating what is at stake are technologies needed to access the deep sea.…

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Pockets of Hope in the Coral Triangle

By Henley Spiers, Underwater Photographer / Dive Instructor

The Coral Triangle is my favourite place on Earth. I’ve had the privilege of working there for three years as a dive instructor, and I return to it any opportunity I get. I love it there and yet have only seen a fraction of what it has to offer. The Coral Triangle is a massive area which encompasses the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. It spans an area 2.2 million square miles big – that’s more than eight times the size of Texas. It is often called the ‘Amazon of the Seas’. This is because it’s the centre of marine biodiversity for planet Earth. Here are a couple of headline facts:

The Coral Triangle holds 76% of the world’s coral species.…

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The High Stakes of Communicating About Sharks

 
By Colin Ruggiero, Filmmaker/Photographer

 
Shark Week is upon us, those seven days every year when the Discovery Channel uses dubious tactics and a misunderstood predator to boost it’s ratings. In light of that, I thought I’d reflect briefly on fear of sharks and a recent lesson I’ve learned about conservation in the age of soundbites and sensational media.  
Not long ago I got news that a large tiger shark had been killed on a small island in the Bahamas where I’ve spent a lot of time. Many of the locals there have a general policy of killing any potentially dangerous sharks that they find near the island in shallow water. They go out with a bang stick, which is a long pole spear with a high-powered firearm round at the tip, kill them and drag them back to the public beach.…

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Deep Sea Mining…Out Of Our Depth

Aliens finally made it to planet Earth. And it just so happens these aliens value — above all else — the American quarter, those shiny metal pieces emblazoned with George Washington. Upon surveying the planet, the aliens note that the highest concentration of quarters are located on Manhattan Island. So, they deploy enormous mechanical arms that raze New York City, destroying icons of culture and human achievement hundreds of years in the making. What’s left is rubble strewn with quarters, which the aliens methodically gather up and stockpile. The aliens congratulate themselves on the efficiency and handsome profitability of their operation.
If this sounds like an absurd manner in which to value one of the greatest cities on Earth, that’s because it is. …

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Hope Spots: An Actionable Plan to Save the Ocean

The immense problems facing the ocean often leave us feeling powerless. But what if there was a concrete, actionable strategy to nurse the ocean back to health? Dr. Sylvia Earle argues that there is. As a result, Mission Blue and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) are opening up nominations for ‘Hope Spots‘ – marine areas in a network targeted for enhanced protection that are critical to the health of the ocean.
Hope Spots are areas in the ocean recognized by scientists for having unique ecological attributes that make them especially deserving of designation as marine protected areas. They may have an exceptional abundance and diversity of species such as the Coral Triangle Hope Spot in the Indo-Pacific. Or perhaps they have an ecosystem essential to marine life migration such as the Sargasso Sea Hope Spot in the Atlantic Ocean.…

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