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In November 2016, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in New Zealand triggered underwater mudslides in the underwater canyon off the coastline. This led to high-velocity currents to flush 850 tonnes of sediment from the canyon into the ocean.

This "canyon flushing" caused what was once a diverse ecosystem of invertebrates along the Kaikoura underwater canyon to become as "quiet as a desert."

A paper in the Deep Sea Research Part I journal describes how sperm whales were subsequently affected by the quake and how they changed their foraging habits as a result.

The international dive community was shocked and grief-stricken when the news broke of the devastating fire that consumed the award-winning California-based liveaboard Conception and the 34 people who perished, including divers and crew members. The accident struck close to home, as many of us have taken dive trips on liveaboards at some point. Some among us had even been on that particular vessel.

Scientists from Queensland Museum (QM), University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia completed a 21-day trip from the Capricorn Bunkers off Gladstone to Thursday Island in the Torres Strait late last year. Scientists discovered dozens of new coral species on a recent voyage along the length of the Great Barrier Reef.

“On almost every dive we were finding species that aren’t in the books"

Professor Andrew Baird, James Cook University

After studying 186 live strandings of healthy gray whales from 1985 to 2018, researchers at Duke University concluded that whales' navigational sense is affected by solar storms taking place as far away as our sun.

The researchers based their findings on the fact that the strandings are more likely to occur on days when there are more sunspots. Linked to solar storms, sunspots represent sudden releases of high-energy particles from the sun. These may disrupt magnetic orientation behaviour when they interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere.