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  1. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. The Louisiana shelf and the Mississippi River plume, 25 July 2026. The hypoxic zone sits on the bottom and is measured from a ship. What is visible is the river plume at the surface, not the dead zone.

    News · 17 September 2026

    One thousand three hundred and thirty-two

    A tropical storm crossed the northern shelf five days before this year's dead-zone survey sailed. The zone came in at 1,332 square miles against a forecast of 7,027, and the storm is most of the difference.
  2. A person crouching at the edge of a pond to collect a water sample. Stock photograph.

    Solutions · 15 September 2026

    What is actually being bought

    Somebody at a utility is writing the environmental performance clause of a tender this week, and in twelve days a European rule quietly removes one of the answers they could have accepted. What is left is a parameter, a place, a period and a named party holding the instruments. That happens to be the whole of what an Aquatic Prosperity Program is, so here it is, written out as a schedule rather than described.
  3. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. The Great Barrier Reef, off the Queensland coast, 26 February 2026. Coral cover cannot be read from this image and is not being read from it. The survey the piece argues about is a manta tow count, made in the water, and nothing here corroborates or contradicts it.

    Water Column · Issue 04 · 8 September 2026

    Shaded by rain

    Coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef went up this year and the reason was weather. Two honest readings of that sentence point in opposite directions, and the survey cannot settle between them, because the thing they disagree about has not yet been measured.
  4. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. Maumee Bay and the Toledo shoreline, western Lake Erie, 28 August 2026. A bloom's colour is its size. Whether the water at the intake is toxic is the second measurement, and no satellite takes it.

    Systems · 1 September 2026

    Two measurements; one of them closes a tap

    NOAA expects a moderate bloom on western Lake Erie this summer, and adds that a bloom's size is not necessarily an indication of how toxic it is. Two measurements; one of them closes a tap.
  5. Hard corals on a reef, underwater. Stock photograph.

    News · 31 August 2026

    Coral cover, and the sentence beside it

    A global coral report landed today with one number on the front of it and, a few pages in, a sentence from its own authors saying that number is not the condition of a reef. The second sentence is the one worth keeping.
  6. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. The Arkona Basin in the western Baltic, between Rügen and southern Sweden, 8 August 2026. Surface colour shows where cyanobacteria gathered on the day. It does not show nitrogen fixed, toxin, or the oxygen debt below the halocline.

    Regions · 27 August 2026

    The sea that makes its own fertilizer

    A harbor master on Bornholm spent the third week of August watching soup arrive in his own basin, and sailors kept coming up the quay to tell him their engine filters were blocking. What is feeding it comes partly from rivers and partly from the seabed underneath them, and that second half is why the obvious fix is so slow.
  7. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. Western Lake Erie and the mouth of the Maumee River, 21 August 2026. Colour in the water is biomass, which is what the severity index counts. Toxin is not visible from orbit, and that gap is the piece.

    Systems · 24 August 2026

    Western Lake Erie: bloom size is not toxicity

    In spring the Maumee River carries phosphorus into the shallowest corner of Lake Erie, and by summer the basin turns. NOAA forecast this year's at 3.5 on a scale where 3 to 5 is moderate, which is a sentence about how much algae there will be and not about how toxic it is.
  8. Sentinel-2 L2A surface reflectance, bands B04/B03/B02. The Hallaniyat Islands, Oman, 14 August 2026. The vessel is not resolvable at ten metres and is not identified here. No slick is delineated, and the reserve's boundary - whose annex was never published - is not drawn.

    Water Column · Issue 03 · 18 August 2026

    Eight months

    Oman made the waters around the Hallaniyat Islands a marine reserve in November. A sanctioned tanker carrying a million barrels ran aground inside it the following June. The thing preventing anybody from reaching the hull is the monsoon that fills Dhofar's hotels.
  9. Sentinel-3 SLSTR channel S8 brightness temperature, night pass, ramped 270-305 K. The western Mediterranean, 29 June 2026. The blue in this frame is cloud, not cold water: S8 is a top-of-atmosphere brightness temperature and cloud tops read cold, so the most striking thing in the picture is weather rather than sea. It is also a night-time field, and it is not an anomaly against the 1991-2020 mean - the eight-degree figure the piece cites is an anomaly, a different quantity, and this image is not its source.

    Water Column · Issue 02 · 28 July 2026

    The sea that sets its record in June

    The Mediterranean's old benchmark belonged to 2003, the summer of the European heat wave. It has now been beaten in the month before the season that set it, and the way it was beaten is stranger than the fact.