More than a decade after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster, its operators are dumping once-contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean. Is that OK?

Supersonic jets like the Concorde face concerns over safety, high carbon output, and cost. They also make loud sonic booms so loud that only transoceanic flights are legal. Now one NASA program is trying to make a quiet supersonic plane...

Everyone makes mistakes, but misidentifying a species more than 100 times? It happened. In this List Show, we tell the tale of the periwinkle snail and other creatures scientists confused for someone else.

There are a lot of weird exoplanets out there, like 55 Cancri e (aka Janssen), which is probably half covered in lava. But the half that's covered in lava might not be quite the half you're thinking of.

Computer models of climate change have long predicted that the ocean would turn green as a result of warming. But the change can't be seen by the human eye, so scientists weren't sure how they'd measure this effect... until it turned out...

It was pretty impressive when LIGO detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes. Well we’ve just taken that to the next level with a galaxy-spanning gravitational wave detector that may have detected a foundational element of...

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.

The marine reptiles Ichthyosaurs arose after The Great Dying, which wiped out at least 90 percent of life in the oceans, changing the seas forever and triggering a new evolutionary arms race between predator and prey.

There was a time in Earth’s history that was so stable, geologists once called it the Boring Billion. But the fact is, this period was anything but boring. In fact, it set the stage for our modern version of plate tectonics - and...

Paleodictyon, a hexagonal-patterned fossil, is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know if it’s a trace fossil, or the organism itself. So… what could it be?

Elongated tubes, flat ribbons, and other “worm-like” body plans were so varied and abundant that a part of the Ediacaran is sometimes known as Wormworld. But in the end, the ancient Wormworld was ended by the actions of its very own worms.

Mystacodon is the earliest known mysticete, the group that, today, we call the baleen whales. But if this was a baleen whale, where was its baleen? Where did baleen come from? And how did it live without it?

Over 600 million years ago, sheets of ice coated our planet on both land and sea. How did this happen? And most importantly for us, why did the planet eventually thaw again? The evidence for Snowball Earth is written on every continent...

At a site known as Cerro Ballena or Whale Hill, there are more than 40 skeletons of marine mammals -- a graveyard of ocean life dating back 6.5 million to 9 million years ago, in the Late Miocene Epoch. But the identity of the killer...

In the middle of the Cambrian, life on land was about to get a little more crowded. And those newcomers would end up changing the world. The arrival of plants on land would make the world colder, drain much of the oxygen out of the...

It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning of...

How did seahorses — one of the ocean’s worst swimmers — spread around the globe? And where did they come from in the first place?

Ocean currents are our planet’s circulatory system, and they keep everything from ecosystems to the climate healthy. But we’re changing Earth in ways that threaten to disrupt and even break critical ocean currents like the planet-wide...

There’s been a lot of talk on YouTube lately about ocean plastic pollution and #TeamSeas. But there hasn’t been enough talk about the *ridiculously unthinkable scale of the ocean plastic pollution problem* or how it intersects with other...

Over the past two decades, jellyfish have begun to overwhelm our oceans. If things stay on their current trajectory, we could be headed for a future where the entire ocean is thick with jellyfish. So, is there anything that can keep...

20 million years ago, the ocean housed a creature so colossal that its stomach could reach volumes of almost 10,000 liters— big enough to fit an entire orca. It was the megalodon, the biggest shark to ever live. So, what was it like when...

What would it take to make global supply chains cleaner and greener? Bo Cerup-Simonsen -- who's helping decarbonize the maritime industry as CEO of the Mærsk Mc-Kinney Møller Center for Zero Carbon Shipping -- discusses why tenacious...

Jellyfish aren't the most nutritious animals in the ocean. Yet sea turtles and many other organisms get their nutrition from almost nothing else. Here's why they don't totally starve to death.

Sponges might not look like particularly complex animals, but they've had billions of years to evolve their own special systems. And one of those systems might involve sending messages through their body in the form of light.