SEVENSEAS Travel Magazine — No. 135 August 2026

Photo: Zdenek Machacek / Unsplash

Panama protects more than half of its ocean on paper. On the water the story is more complicated. Humpbacks, Coiba’s reefs, Guna Yala and the cloud forest, for travellers who would rather know than be sold to.

Photo credit to be added

The environment ministry puts national mangrove cover at roughly 183,774 hectares and says half the original extent has gone in fifty years. The figures are ministry claims, and the headline number has not held still.

Photo: Lukasz Ginalski / Ocean Conservancy

Two governments are the first to join the Mesopelagic Zone Conservation Challenge, a voluntary pledge covering the water column between 200 and 1,000 meters. The layer feeds the fisheries above it, and almost nobody has agreed to manage it.

Photo: Dr. Bill McGraw

Dr Bill McGraw documents colour changes in Porites corals at Seca Islands, Gulf of Chiriqui, that he has not seen in fifteen years, and argues the current El Nino may prove the most destructive bleaching event yet recorded.

Photo: Schmidt Ocean Institute

A month-long Schmidt Ocean Institute expedition to the mid-Atlantic’s Doldrums Fracture Zone found two rare hybrid hydrothermal vent fields and captured the first footage of a barreleye fish in its natural habitat.

Stock image

Warm-bodied predators burn nearly four times the energy of cold-blooded fish to hold their thermal edge. New research warns that a warming ocean is turning that advantage into a liability.

Photo: URI Inner Space Center

URI opened its Ocean Robotics Laboratory on the Narragansett Bay Campus with an underwater ribbon cutting, part of a $300 million bet on the blue economy.

Photo: Tavish Campbell

A new Scientific Reports study finds ocean fisheries routinely harvest Chinook before they mature, shrinking the fish and future runs, and that fishing closer to the rivers could rebuild bigger salmon and feed Southern Resident orcas.

Photo: Fred Pompermayer

After three years of preparation, ocean pioneer Chris Bertish called off his world-first solo Pacific crossing on the eve of departure. The mission behind it, a circular-economy classroom and tree-planting in Northern Kenya, is going ahead regardless.

Photo: Marcus Kauffman / Unsplash

Five years of Schmidt Sciences VESRI research have reshaped climate modeling, from an ocean emulator that runs hundreds of times faster to a finding that fire adds roughly 60 percent more carbon to the atmosphere than earlier estimates reflected.

Image: Jakotango Riding Safaris. Photo: Anya Campbell

A young travel platform is drawing notice for building its roster around outfitters that say they leave land and wildlife better than they found them. For readers who follow marine ecotourism, the logic is closer than it looks.

Photo: ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours

ExperiencePlus! Bicycle Tours has announced a seven-day guided gravel ride through Finland’s northeastern Lapland, pairing boreal forest, quiet lakes and reindeer country with family-run lodges, smoke saunas and the long light of the Arctic summer.

Photo: Rob Moir

On an Icelandic river below Lake Myvatn, a duck built to vanish into moving water offers a quiet lesson about what it means to belong.