Facing rising temperatures, a spike in acidity driven by an influx of carbon, mass habitat destruction, and inescapable pollution, the world’s oceans haven’t had it easy. But in an ominously literal sense, the situation may be even darker than we realized.

New research indicates that more than a fifth of the global ocean has darkened over the past two decades, with the depths that sunlight can penetrate significantly retreating.

The findings, published in a new study in the journal Global Change Biology, describe a worrying shrinking in the ocean’s crucial photic zones — the uppermost layer where 90 percent of all marine life, from fish to photosynthesizing plankton, reside.

This “reduces the amount of ocean available for animals that rely on the Sun and the Moon for their survival and reproduction,” said study author Thomas Davies, associate professor of marine conservation at the University of Plymouth, in a statement about the work.

Davies and his colleague Tim Smyth, a marine biogeochemist from the University of Exeter, used two decades of NASA satellite data to model how the depth of the photic zone has shrunk between 2003 and 2022.

In all, they found that 21 percent of the deep blue had fallen into gloom, with some regions more hard hit than others. For ten percent of the world’s oceans — an area equal to the continent of Africa — the depth of the photic zone decreased by over 164 feet (50 meters). In 2.6 percent of the ocean, the dusking was even more extreme, with the photic zone depth receding by more than 328 feet (100 meters). Conversely, it’s worth noting, about ten percent of the ocean became lighter.

Scientists have long warned about this phenomenon. But according to the researchers, the extent of it wasn’t well known until now.

“There has been research showing how the surface of the ocean has changed color over the last twenty years, potentially as a result of changes in plankton communities,” Davies said in the statement.

So far, a clear culprit for the dimming hasn’t emerged. The causes in this case appear more involute and disparate — but humans, from what we can tell, do share a significant part of the blame.

Sediments and other materials dumped into the water near coasts can contribute to blocking sunlight, the authors note. But this doesn’t explain why we’re seeing darkening in the open ocean, most prominently in regions around the Arctic and Antarctic, where climate change is dramatically reshaping the environment.

The authors conclude that a “combination of nutrient, organic material and sediment loading near the coasts and changes in global ocean circulation are probable causes” of the ocean darkening, they wrote in the paper.

We’re only just beginning to grapple with this tenebrous trend, but the impact it could have could be catastrophic.

We rely on the photic zones for the “air we breathe, the fish we eat, our ability to fight climate change, and for the general health and well-being of the planet,” Davies added. “Taking all of that into account, our findings represent genuine cause for concern.”

More on oceans: Heartbreaking Video Shows Fish Fleeing Huge Nets

We could be severely undercounting the number of humans living on Earth, researchers suggest.

While the United Nations has determined that as of last summer, there were about 8.2 billion humans sharing the limited resources of our planet, a new estimate finds that figure could be off by anywhere from hundreds of millions to an astonishing several billion people.

That might sound like an alarming revelation. But as Queen Mary University of London professor Jonathan Kennedy argues in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian, overpopulation is “rarely just about the numbers.”

“They reflect power struggles over which lives matter, who is a burden or a threat and ultimately what the future should look like,” he wrote.

The UN’s figures are based on census data and population density across a global grid. But employing a different methodology, as Aalto University postdoctoral researcher Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues outlined in a paper published in the journal Nature earlier this year, the real number of people on Earth could be vastly higher.

That’s because datasets in rural areas are often incomplete and can be unreliable. The researchers found “large discrepancies between the examined datasets,” implying that “rural population is, even in the most accurate dataset, underestimated by half compared to reported figures.”

At the same time, concerns about “overpopulation” have historically been blown out of proportion, Kennedy argued. The world’s population, per the UN, will stabilize and peak around the mid-2080s, at which point, it’s expected to start falling.

“That many people will put considerable stress on the Earth’s resources,” Kennedy wrote, “but if consumption is managed responsibly and sustainable technologies are developed, the world will avoid an apocalyptic catastrophe.”

Others, most notably billionaire Elon Musk, see population collapse as a far bigger threat.

“Population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization,” Musk argued in a 2021 tweet.

Of course, there are plenty of other enormous existential threats facing humanity, from climate change to dwindling resources to a devastating loss of biodiversity.

But overpopulation concerns often perpetuate ethnonationalism and a perceived threat of immigrants bringing the end of the “western civilization,” Kennedy warned.

“They worry about their countries being indelibly changed by mass migration,” he wrote. “But the cold hard truth is that in a few decades our shrinking, ageing societies will desperately need these newcomers to pay taxes and work in healthcare and social care.”

“This vision of the future may be unsettling for some, but the alternative is much worse,” Kennedy added.

More on overpopulation: Hordes of Tourists Are Trashing Antarctica

David Attenborough has become the voice we associate with all things beautiful in nature, but he’s never shied away from showing the harrowing destruction that humans visit upon our planet.

This, however, might be the biggest gut-punch he’s delivered yet. In his latest documentary “OCEAN,” Attenborough presents us with unique footage showing the devastating effects of bottom trawling on the seafloor, right where the action is happening. The filmmakers placed a camera underwater, showing us the actual view of the trawl net as it sweeps up countless poor sea creatures, who desperately try to out-swim their doom.

It’s an unprecedented look — but it doesn’t make for easy viewing.

“I have seen the bycatch on the deck of trawlers, but like everybody else, I had never seen what the trawl does underwater,” Enric Sala, a marine ecologist who served as executive producer and scientific advisor on Ocean, told IFLScience in a recent interview. “Being at the level of the net and seeing all these poor creatures trying to escape the net, that’s something that nobody else had seen.”

Bottom trawling is a widely used method of fishing that involves dragging an enormous net across the seafloor, ensnaring hundreds if not thousands of aquatic creatures in a single sweep. It’s a blunt approach that doesn’t discriminate between species. Most of the fish that get caught aren’t even what the fishermen are looking for, but they perish anyway.

“Over three-quarters of a trawler’s catch may be thrown away,” Attenborough narrates in the documentary. “It’s hard to imagine a more wasteful way to catch fish.”

Trawling also ravages the seafloor itself, as the heavy chain or beam that keeps the net open smashes into any rock or aquatic fauna in its path, while dredging up literal tons of sediment.

“The trawlers tear the seabed with such force, that their trails of destruction can be seen from space,” Attenborough says.

It gets worse. As the seabed is thrown up, so are the vast stores of carbon it harbored. A massive 2024 study estimated that some 370 million metric tons of carbon dioxide is released by bottom trawling every single year. That puts it “on the scale of global aviation,” Sala said, which produces nearly a billion tons annually.

In terms of both the greenhouse impact and the sweeping scale of the damage wreaked to local habitats, it’s the ocean’s equivalent to deforestation. One study estimated that bottom trawlers scrape 1.9 million square miles of seafloor per year, roughly equivalent to 1.3 percent of the entire ocean.

“It’s happening everywhere around the ocean, including in many of our protected areas,” Toby Nowlan, the director and producer on OCEAN, told IFLScience. “The difference being that this is as destructive as bulldozing your local ancient woodland, or the Amazon rainforest.”

“If my local ancient woodland, Leigh Woods, was just bulldozed, the entire city would be up in arms, but this is what’s happening underwater,” Nowlan added. “The whole reason [people aren’t up in arms about trawling] is that it’s remained hidden from view.”

Not anymore.

More on the ocean: Benevolent Orca Pods Are Adopting Baby Pilot Whales in an Apparent Effort to Clean Up the Species’ Image

An international team of scientists from the Schmidt Ocean Institute have captured the first ever footage of a colossal squid — the terrors of the sea that are legendary for both their monstrous proportions and elusiveness — roaming in its natural habitat.

But to say it’s a big discovery might be misleading. Found lurking in the depths of the South Atlantic Ocean, the specimen is a juvenile mollusk, measuring barely a foot in length. With a transparent body, you might mistake it for some form of jellyfish at first. Mainly, it’s the tiny tentacles that betray its true identity.

It’s no Kraken sighting, in other words. But so rare are these deep sea predators that any footage at all is invaluable. And besides, witnessing one as a baby isn’t without its charm or scientific insight.

“I actually love that this is our first glimpse of what will become a true giant,” Kat Bolstad, a cephalopod biologist at the Auckland University of Technology who helped verify the video, told The New York Times. “It’s exciting to see the first in situ footage of a juvenile colossal and humbling to think that they have no idea that humans exist,” Kat added in a statement, per NPR.

The footage was captured using a remotely operated vehicle dubbed SuBastian, at a depth of around 2,000 feet in March. Researchers on the expedition sent the footage to Bolstad, who confirmed that the specimen on display was indeed the famed creature, albeit in miniature.

Colossal squids inhabit the cold depths of the Antarctic seas. As adults, they can grow up to 23 feet long — and perhaps close to twice that if you measure from tip to the ends of their tentacles — and weigh around 1,100 pounds. They shouldn’t be confused with giant squids, which grow to similar lengths but are slenderer and less heavy, favoring more temperate waters.

The colossal squid’s existence was first discovered secondhand, through their chewed-up remains found in the stomach of a sperm whale in 1925. It wasn’t until 1981 that a living full adult specimen was caught accidentally by fishermen. And nearly a century on, we still have a lot to learn about these mysterious creatures, which may in fact be trying to avoid humans.

“They’re very aware of their surroundings, because any disturbance in the water column around them might mean a predator,” Bolstad told the NYT. Fully grown colossal squids boast the largest eyes in the animal kingdom, at roughly the size of a basketball, making them extremely adept at spying both prey and predators in the dark waters they call home.

Finding more won’t be easy, but this discovery is an encouraging reminder that it’s possible. With any luck, the next one that the team spots will live up to its behemoth reputation.

“I can’t wait to see what a live adult colossal squid looks like, at home in the deep sea where it belongs,” Bolstad told the NYT.

More on marine life: Scientists Revive Organism Found Buried at Bottom of Ocean

Are you sitting down? Because there’s some news that might shock you.

A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change has found that the richest 10 percent of the world population are responsible for an astonishing two-thirds of observable climate warming since 1990. Basically, that small minority of the wealthiest among us contribute nearly seven times as much to extreme climate change as the entire lower-earning 90 percent of the planet.

If that’s not enough to have you reaching for your pitchfork, the top 1 percent contribute 20 times as much to climate disasters as the bottom 99 percent. Since 2019, the research article notes, the “wealthiest 10 percent of the global population accounted for nearly half of global emissions” through “private consumption and investments, whereas the poorest 50 percent accounted for only one-tenth of global emissions.”

The results were developed by fusing climate change models with economic data, which allowed researchers to zero in on rates of toxic emissions from various income groups throughout the globe. By linking climate change with the economy, they found the source of these emissions overwhelmingly skewed toward the top hoarders of wealth.

“If everyone had emitted like the bottom 50 percent of the global population, the world would have seen minimal additional warming since 1990,” co-author Carl-Friedrich Schleussner said. “Addressing this imbalance is crucial for fair and effective climate action.”

While the numbers are staggering, they’re far from shocking at this point. In the United States, the top 1 percent of households control 80 percent of company assets — the average person reading this has no way of ending the coal industry’s devastating reign over Appalachia, for example. That’s a decision to be made by shareholders and executives looming over us from the top of the pyramid.

Rather, the article is just more confirmation of something we’ve known for years: the rich are the biggest threat to the climate by far. But while most studies on wealth and climate change hone in on consumption habits, this bit of research looks a little deeper under the hood at the system making this all possible.

Instead of simply arguing that rich people consume more than the average pauper — a verifiable fact, to be clear — these researchers studied emissions through the flow of public and private investments, as well as global trade. This gives a much more complete picture of the actual cause and effect of Earth-melting pollution, following the key source of power in our capitalist world: property.

The poorest among us, owning no factories, private jets, or oil rigs, are hardly a glimmer in the rearview mirror of the ultrarich as they race toward emission rates previously unseen by humankind. Climate change, being clearly tied to economic activity, is simply one of dozens of consequences of our chosen economic system — and as the old adage goes, “it all rolls downhill.”

“To mainstream commerce, the Earth is both loot and dump,” wrote climate journalist George Monbiot. “Commercial activity, broadly speaking, consists of extracting resources from a hole in the ground on one side of the planet, inducing people to buy them, then dumping them a few days later in a hole in the ground on the other side.”

Look no further for evidence of this than the ultrarich themselves. Measuring their wealth in increasingly fractured portfolios and webs of corporate spending, those who do own the factories hide their role in the changing climate through tall tales of consumer responsibility: recycle your plastics, buy an electric car, and use paper straws.

Yet as the research clearly shows, none of these measures has a hope of making a dent in the grand scheme of climate emissions. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try — but that until the ultrawealthy are brought to heel, we have about as much chance of stopping climate change as BP has of stopping its next oil spill. That is, not very much at all.

More on billionaires: Bill Gates Gives Up on Climate Change