Introduction As climate change progresses, marine systems are in increasingly hot water – literally. Water has a high heat capacity and as such our oceans have absorbed 90% of the excess heat created by greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere. These warming waters have led to four major global coral bleaching events. The fourth and most devastating started in 2023 and is ongoing. In this article, we’ll dive into the mechanisms behind coral bleaching, the impacts of bleaching even

The ocean faces many threats from pollution to climate change. In this new series “Disasters at Sea” we will be covering environmental disasters and their effects on marine systems. In this, the first article of the series, we're covering one infamous environmental disaster that sparked the beginning of the environmental movement of the 1970s and led to the creation of America’s first Earth Day: the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969. The Disaster: The Santa Barbara Oil Spill of