What the Wildfire Smoke in Your Sky Has to Do With the Ocean
Release Date: 07/20/2026
How to Network at Marine Science Conferences Like a Pro
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The US government is moving toward the world's first commercial deep-sea mining lease sale, and it's happening in federal waters off American Samoa. In this episode, Andrew breaks down how we got here: a California startup's 2025 request to mine polymetallic nodules, the Request for Information process that followed, and the 75,000-plus public comments that came in during the 30-day comment window, with 80 to 98% opposed to mining. Despite that opposition, and despite a standing moratorium from American Samoa's own governor, the federal government expanded the proposed mining area from 18...
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Ghost Nets: Why They Keep Happening and What's Actually Working
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A viral TikTok about fish aggregation devices drifting into marine protected areas got Andrew thinking about a topic he hasn't covered in a while: ghost nets. In this episode, he breaks down what ghost nets actually are, the scientific term for them (ALDFG, or abandoned, lost, or otherwise discarded fishing gear), and why they're a growing, well-documented problem from the ocean surface all the way down to the deep seafloor. Andrew walks through what the peer-reviewed research shows: entanglement patterns across whales, seals, sea turtles, and coral reefs, a personal diving story off Big...
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What the Wildfire Smoke in Your Sky Has to Do With the Ocean
How To Protect The Ocean
For a week straight, Andrew watched his own sky turn orange outside Toronto as smoke from nearly 900 wildfires burning across Canada, most of them following the boreal forest from the east coast to Northwestern Ontario, drifted south into the US and back again. He walks through what actually happened on the ground: which towns and First Nations were evacuated, how bad the air quality got (Toronto briefly had the worst AQI in the world), and why northwestern Ontario, not a hugely populated area but home to vulnerable First Nations communities, bore the brunt of it. Then he digs into why this...
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100 Years of Data Reveals Why Sharks Keep Stealing Your Catch
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If you've ever felt a hard strike, fought a fish, and reeled up nothing but a head, you already know what shark depredation feels like. In this episode, Andrew breaks down a new study that tracked shark depredation across the entire Atlantic coast, from Maine to Texas and the US Caribbean, going back a full century to figure out why it's happening more now than ever before. The study found at least 51 targeted fish stocks affected and 22 shark species involved, with bull sharks and sandbar sharks showing up most often. But the real story isn't that sharks are out of control. It's that...
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What Lives in the Middle of the Ocean?
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Oil Companies Knew Coral Reefs Would Dissolve. In 1978.
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In 1978, an Exxon scientist asked a question in capital letters: were the oceans dissolving coral reefs? By 1982, Exxon's own scientists had the answer, in writing. So did Shell by 1986. This episode traces a newly published Oxford University study that dug through more than fourteen thousand pages of fossil fuel industry documents and found that the world's biggest oil and gas companies understood, decades before the public did, exactly how their product would wreck coral reefs. We walk through what the industry knew and when, how a funded think tank report in 2012 was built to look like an...
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For more than a decade, almost 2,000 volunteers have walked California's beaches with clipboards, counting every swimmer, surfer, angler, and boat they see. It sounds simple, maybe even a little strange. But that pile of data, more than a million tally marks collected between 2012 and 2020, just answered a question marine scientists have debated for years: do marine protected areas actually work in the real world, not just on paper? In this episode, we walk through what researchers found when they finally pulled that decade of volunteer data together. We look at how the MPA Watch program...
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The Silent Damage Behind Your Canned Tuna
How To Protect The Ocean
Right now, somewhere in the open ocean, a raft the size of a small table is drifting with no one steering it. It's called a fish aggregating device, or FAD, and the tuna industry drops thousands of them into the water every year to lure fish to the surface. A new study published in Science Advances tracked where these rafts actually end up, and the answer is unsettling: they've likely drifted through more than half of the world's marine protected areas by total area, with over 6,300 strandings recorded across 174 protected areas in 53 countries and territories. When a drifting FAD washes onto...
info_outlineFor a week straight, Andrew watched his own sky turn orange outside Toronto as smoke from nearly 900 wildfires burning across Canada, most of them following the boreal forest from the east coast to Northwestern Ontario, drifted south into the US and back again. He walks through what actually happened on the ground: which towns and First Nations were evacuated, how bad the air quality got (Toronto briefly had the worst AQI in the world), and why northwestern Ontario, not a hugely populated area but home to vulnerable First Nations communities, bore the brunt of it.
Then he digs into why this keeps happening. Most of Ontario's fires this season were sparked by lightning, not arson, despite conspiracy theories claiming otherwise (arson accounts for well under a quarter of cases). An active El Nino is drying things out further, and climate change is intensifying the underlying heat and dryness that let these fires spread. Andrew also connects the dots to the ocean directly: the boreal forest is one of the planet's biggest carbon sinks, and when it burns that stored carbon heads into the atmosphere, where roughly a quarter of it eventually gets absorbed by the ocean, driving further acidification.
The back half of the episode gets political. Ontario slashed its emergency firefighting budget from $271 million spent in 2025-26 down to $150 million budgeted for 2026-27, even as Premier Doug Ford defends the province's readiness. Meanwhile, US President Trump and several senators have floated tariffs and sanctions against Canada over the smoke, a move Andrew calls scientifically and diplomatically backwards given how often Canada and the US send firefighters and equipment across the border to help each other. He closes with concrete steps listeners can take, from checking air quality indexes to contacting elected officials about wildfire funding.
Takeaways From the Episode
- Nearly 900 wildfires were burning across Canada as of July 16, most following the boreal forest belt into Northwestern Ontario.
- Vulnerable First Nations communities and small towns bore the brunt of evacuations, some residents had to self-evacuate by boat or air with little warning.
- Most fires were lightning-caused, not arson, arson accounts for well under a quarter of cases despite online conspiracy theories.
- Burning boreal forest releases stored carbon into the atmosphere, and roughly a quarter of human-caused CO2 emissions get absorbed by the ocean, tying wildfires directly to ocean acidification.
- Ontario cut its baseline emergency firefighting budget from $271 million spent to $150 million budgeted for the coming year, a proactive-versus-reactive funding problem.
- US tariffs and sanctions threats against Canada over the smoke ignore how often the two countries help each other fight fires, including the loss of a Canadian firefighter in Colorado this year.
- Individual actions still matter: check air quality indexes before extended time outdoors, follow evacuation orders immediately if you're in a fire zone, keep a 72-hour go bag ready, and contact your elected officials if wildfire underfunding frustrates you.
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