I love Casper the friendly Octopus boingboing.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from boingboing.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For years, it was commonly thought that humpback whales did not have a presence in the Papahānaumokuākea National Marine Monument, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association. That changed in 2006, when scientists recorded a whale song remotely, but not much was known about abundance at the time A new paper reports an abundance of […]
In 2016, Barack Obama, the U.S. president at the time, made a proclamation: he would expand the protection of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a stretch of ocean fringing the islands and atolls of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands that native Hawaiians consider to be sacred. Ten years earlier, his predecessor, George W. Bush had protected […]
As we explored out into and under our seas, there too we found features worth naming. While today, naming an underwater feature is a formalized process coordinated by international organizations, many names of underwater features reflect the history of how, and often who, discovered them. Your national marine sanctuaries have names too, usually derived from the geographic area they encompass or the resources they protect. But where did those names come from in the first place? Let’s take a voyage and learn the stories behind the names of some of the nation’s most important ocean places.