When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of the Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco, California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options: abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.

Captain Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 meters or so away, but the span too perilous to cross.

The Puritan had run aground on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, near Bonilla Point, about 110 kilometers west of Victoria. Today, the sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific” is hackneyed, but in the late 1800s, when colonial expansion was well underway in western North America, the graveyard—a stretch of coastline roughly from the Columbia River in the United States to northern Vancouver Island—acquired ships on the regular. In what probably seemed like an uninhabited middle of nowhere, Atwood and his men waited for a miracle. Luckily, they were actually in the inhabited middle of somewhere—a coastline that for millennia had been home to Indigenous peoples. Did the mariners think they were delirious when shadowy apparitions at the forest’s edge resolved into flesh-and-blood men and started wading toward the schooner?

Waist deep in the churning sea, the men tied a stone to the end of a fishing line and tossed it toward the crew. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. For almost eight hours, a newspaper later reported, they threw the line and the Puritan crew tried to catch it.

Finally, a crewman hooked the line and attached a heavier line to the smaller one. The rescuers then dragged the line to shore and secured it, allowing the crew to sling themselves to safety as if on a zipline. From there, the Indigenous men escorted the Puritan’s crew to a nearby shelter where they provided food and stayed with the men until help arrived.

Map data by ArcGIS

Sixty kilometers up the coast and 128 years later, another rescue is underway. On a drippy, monochrome February afternoon, nine men on three boats scan the rocky shore of Trevor Channel near the small village of Bamfield. They’ve been alerted by a “pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan” call—marine radio lingo for an urgent but not life-threatening situation: “At one-six-zero-zero Pacific Standard Time, this station received a report of overdue kayakers in the vicinity of Trevor Channel, Robbers Pass,” coast guard radio reported. Three kayakers missed their scheduled check-in call and are considered overdue.

From a boat nearby, Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, watches the boats watching the shore. He’s the one who instigated this search an hour earlier, when he tossed three bald, floppy, PFD-wearing manikins into the water, securing them in place with small anchors. “Don’t be a dummy and lose the dummy,” he quipped as he tethered one with the name tag Julio to a buoy near Robbers Passage.

The nine men searching for Julio, and his friends Amy and Carl, are in Bamfield for immersive training in marine search and rescue. They come from four First Nations along the BC coast, the farthest from the Nisga’a First Nation village of Gingolx where the Nass River empties into the Pacific, north of Prince Rupert. Most have taken a few days just to get here, tasked by their communities to take part.

The intensive course is part of the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue (CNSAR) program, which provides support and training, as well as equipment and infrastructure, to coastal First Nations. The program has been evolving since its inception in 2015, and today, about 27 participants a year take the training in Bamfield, just one of a suite of programs under the coast guard’s Indigenous Community Response Training umbrella. The instruction and formal support are recognition that, like the men who rescued the crew of the Puritan, some of the coast’s most capable search and rescue specialists have been quietly at work since 1854 and no doubt long before. On New Year’s Day of that year, British Columbia’s first recorded shipwreck happened on the west coast. The 14 surviving crewmen of the British brig William were taken ashore and sheltered and fed by Indigenous people living near Pachena Point, just up the coast from where the Puritan wrecked nearly 43 years later.

Thomas Kerr, senior search and rescue program officer with the Canadian Coast Guard, coordinates a mock search for missing kayakers in Barkley Sound, British Columbia, during a week-long search and rescue course in February 2024. The intensive training is part of a comprehensive program of the Canadian Coast Guard that supports coastal First Nations with search and rescue skills, safety equipment, and other resources.

Getting to this point—where some coastal nations are more formally integrated into search and rescues and receive world-class support and training—required foresight by coast guard brass and a great deal of trust by First Nations. Recognition of their on-the-ground expertise within their territories and acknowledgment of their historical participation in rescues—saving survivors, recovering and sometimes burying bodies, getting word of the wreck to lighthouses or nearby settlements—has been long in coming. At best, rescuers in the past were acknowledged with a passing mention in the newspaper, or perhaps a medal or the award of cash. At worst, they were hanged.

A few days before the mock search for Julio and his friends, the first 2024 cohort of CNSAR participants gathers at McKay Bay Lodge in Bamfield. They’ve settled into their rooms and are gathered in the main lodge for orientation. Over dinner, they dispatch stunning mounds of spaghetti and talk quietly among themselves. Every once in a while, murmurs crescendo into cheers—several are streaming the annual All Native Basketball Tournament on their phones and they all have community teams in the competition. The tourney is in its 64th year, and it’s a big deal for the nations who travel to Prince Rupert for the friendly, but also fiercely competitive, week-long event. The shared experience and good-natured goading provides a bit of levity.

Dinner is also punctuated a few times by Scooby-Doo’s ruh-roh. It’s participant Tim Davidson’s text alert from his wife back on Haida Gwaii who’s eight-weeks pregnant and checking in regularly. Within a few minutes of meeting Davidson on the dock earlier that day, he’d shared that it’s the first time he’s been away from his young son. He gripped the front of his PFD, revealing a tattoo of a small hand—the size of his boy’s at three weeks—on the back of his.

Tim Davidson from the Haida Nation, on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, was one of nine participants in the week-long search and rescue training held at the coast guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia.

After dinner, the group crowds onto the couch and armchairs in the lodge’s small living room, the fire in the woodstove snaps, and the large picture window clouds with moisture. This cohort just happens to be all men—women also take part—and ranges in age from 24 to 58. As they pass around a hefty coil of cedar-bark rope, a gift from a past participant that is used as a talking stick of sorts, the men share where they’re from and why they’ve come. Almost all mention their families, either their immediate relations or the larger extended family—aunties, cousins, grandparents, and other elders—of their coastal homes. They’re excited to be here, perhaps nervous and unsure of what to expect, but ultimately they’re eager to gain skills that will serve their communities. They’re all watermen, have spent their lives on boats, and are often tasked with searches since there’s no one else to call—the coast guard can be several hours away. Often, that means searching for a friend or relative. “Picture a 16-year-old kid riding up the river in the dark going to look for your cousin,” says William Smythe of Gingolx, his voice hesitant. “That’s how it started [for me].”

Most have been tasked to come by their communities because they’re already serving in emergency capacities. Warren Aster, from the Gitxaała Nation on British Columbia’s central coast, is emblematic of this. He does community policing for his nation, serves in the fire department and as a first responder, and does environmental monitoring such as water quality testing and abalone surveys. Similarly, Fabian Stewart, from Gingolx, is fire chief and bylaw officer and is always called upon for rescues, whether they be on land or water. “If [there’s an emergency] and you have a running boat, you’d better go out and look,” echoes Smythe, Stewart’s lifelong friend.

In mariners’ parlance, these boats are “vessels of opportunity”—vessels in the vicinity of an incident that can respond. Because in British Columbia there are dozens of coastal First Nations communities—many of which are boat- or floatplane-access-only and where many residents will learn to drive a boat long before they can drive a car—it stands to reason that many of the first first responders on scene will be people from these communities. Such was the case on October 25, 2015, when two fishermen from Ahousaht, a First Nation village of about 1,100 people just up the coast from Tofino, a popular resort destination on Vancouver Island’s west coast, spotted a distress flare. It had been sent from the Leviathan II, a Tofino-based whale watching boat that had capsized. The fishermen tried to get through to the coast guard on channel 16, the emergency channel, but the reception was poor. They also roused their community of Ahousaht on marine VHF channel 68, the radio frequency used for everyday communication within the village. Within minutes, community members mobilized in their own boats. In the end, the Ahousahts helped rescue 21 people and retrieved the bodies of five. The coast guard also responded, as did other boats in the area, but the event brought into sharp relief the fact that First Nations people are often first on scene in marine emergencies and that the coordination of rescue efforts between First Nations and federal authorities was “lacking,” as Roger Girouard, then assistant commissioner for the Canadian Coast Guard said in the accident’s aftermath.

The whale watching boat Leviathan II sank near Tofino, British Columbia, on October 25, 2015. People from the First Nations village of Ahousaht were instrumental in alerting authorities to the accident and in rescuing the survivors. This accident, and others that occurred before, highlighted the fact that First Nations people are often first on the scene when marine tragedies occur. Photo by Chad Hipolito/The Canadian Press

The Leviathan II, as well as the sinking of the BC ferry Queen of the North in 2006—in which the people from Hartley Bay, within Gitga’at First Nation territory, helped get 99 passengers and crew safely to shore—were two dramatic and catastrophic events that demonstrated First Nations people were the “absolute best asset in terms of a first-on-scene resource for marine search and rescue,” says Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard.

When the Leviathan II sank in 2015, the coast guard was taking its first tentative steps to more formally work with First Nations and had started to reach out to communities, but the accident spurred the effort and the 2017 Oceans Protection Plan provided seed funding. The CAN $1.5-billion federal initiative to improve marine safety and protect and restore marine ecosystems included significant investment for coastal First Nations to provide training, equipment, and coordinated planning for integration of local teams into search and rescue operations. Carrow and two other staff were dedicated full-time to crafting the Indigenous Community Response Training program in British Columbia. From the beginning, Carrow knew that for the relationship to work, it had to be led by the communities and it had to be built on trust. First question: Were the communities interested in a more formalized relationship? If so, what did they need? The coast guard’s efforts needed to be tangible and dependable. First Nations were all too accustomed to people arriving on their shores unannounced or with grand pronouncements or ideas to impose.

Since the first recorded contact was made on the BC coast in 1774, when Spanish explorer Juan Pérez on the ship Santiago traded briefly with Haida and Nuu-chah-nulth people, unknown ships have often proved problematic to Indigenous peoples. Explorers, traders, sealers, churches, Indian agents and other representatives of governments took many things: resources, cultural artifacts, fishing gear, children. They left other things behind: diseases, missionaries, burned villages, destroyed canoes, confusion, mistrust.

Worldviews and ideologies collided in February 1869 when the bark John Bright was wrecked on a boulder-studded stretch of shore near Estevan Point, Vancouver Island, losing all 22 on board, including the captain’s wife and children and their nanny. It’s unclear whether the disaster was witnessed by Hesquiaht people of the area, but sometime after it happened, a group came upon the wreck and the beach strewn with bodies, some without clothes, arms, heads. They carried the remains above the high-tide line; some they buried.

Weeks later, a passing trader, known for his less-than-scrupulous behavior, brought news of the wreck to Victoria, where the tragedy was twisted and sensationalized in the British Colonist, the newspaper of the day, fomenting outrage in the capital’s citizenry. The victims had been alive when they got to shore, the self-proclaimed witness insisted, only to be murdered, raped, and defiled on shore—heads cut off “to preclude the possibility of identification,” and the “bodies stripped of all clothing.”

When a body is tossed from a ship and onto a shoreline of boulders and reefs, it churns like a rag doll in a rock tumbler. The head, heavy as a bowling ball, is often the first to disarticulate. Feet also detach, and limbs; the clothing is peeled off by abrasion and the sea’s icy fingers. Coroners know this, and it’s likely that people living on the coast have long known this, too.

The surgeon aboard the gunboat HMS Sparrowhawk, the ship used by the colonial government to dispense law and order along the coast, said as much when he assumed the role of coroner and inspected exhumed bodies, noting that he could find no medical evidence to indicate that the bodies had been decapitated by human hands. He wrote in his notes that wild animals and pounding surf likely accounted for the injuries.

The HMS Sparrowhawk was one of several heavily armed Royal Navy gunboats used by the colonial government in the late 19th century—an era of intense colonial expansion in Western Canada—to assert British authority and protect colonial interests along the coast. Photo by UtCon Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

When the Sparrowhawk arrived on their shore, the Hesquiahts seemed unconcerned and willingly cooperated, including showing the items they’d salvaged from the wreck. Still, despite the coroner’s testimony, officials aboard the Sparrowhawk determined foul play and demanded the villagers turn over the perpetrators. When none were forthcoming, Royal Marines came ashore and burned houses and destroyed canoes. Finally, seven men—five witnesses and two accused—were seized and taken to Victoria for trial.

Against an all-male, all-white jury and unrelenting newspaper coverage, two Hesquiaht men—John Anayitzachist and Katkinna—were accused of murder and sentenced to be hanged. With the men in irons, the Sparrowhawk took them home to their village where they were executed on the beach in front of their community. David Higgins, publisher of the British Colonist, couldn’t resist a final smug volley when he reported that the gallows was left in place as a “lesson” to other “evil-disposed Indians.”

It’s no wonder that it can take time for coastal nations to trust the government when it comes calling, even a century and a half later.

The best advice Carrow received when he first started with the Indigenous Community Response Training was from a supervisor who told him to visit coastal First Nations communities, spend time on the docks, and ask, “How can I help?”

“We didn’t show up with a plan,” Carrow says. “We didn’t show up saying, ‘This is how we’re going to do things.’” Instead, he introduced himself to locals and learned who was often called on for searches or to help tow boats or otherwise offer marine assistance. He found those people whose doors others banged on at 2:00 a.m. when there was an emergency. Then, he explains, he chatted with them about their search and rescue experience, toured their boats, and asked what equipment they might need, such as flares, PFDs, first aid kits, or radios. If they’re going out in their personal boats to help people, “we need to get them the equipment they need so that they’re safe on the water and that they can communicate with us,” says Carrow.

Geoff Carrow, deputy superintendent of search and rescue programs at the Canadian Coast Guard, leads the Indigenous Community Response Training program, which supports search and rescue capabilities within First Nations communities along the BC coast. Photo courtesy of the Canadian Coast Guard

Over eight years, he’s been a consistent face of the program, with strong relationships in First Nations communities. Government officials are too often thought of as driftwood, he says; “We come and go with the tide.”

Today, the program is multifaceted. Carrow, Kerr, and their colleagues regularly visit about 20 coastal communities a year to deliver equipment and get updates on training needs, and they offer different options for skills training, from the thrice-yearly Bamfield intensive to a recently developed “soft landing” program that brings participants to Victoria to tour the coast guard station there, meet staff, and see how they, and their community, can fit within the program.

Fabian Stewart, left, and William Smythe from the Nisga’a First Nation take a cold-water plunge off the dock at the Canadian Coast Guard station in Bamfield, British Columbia, before practicing person-in-water rescue techniques.

Carrow’s team supports a broad range of people to build the search and rescue capacity along the coast. Most comprehensive are the self-run and community-led Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary stations. Eight are currently operational, with two more in the works. They’re in places that have a demonstrated search and rescue need—where communities already do a significant number of searches, and which aren’t easily served by regular coast guard stations. These units have purpose-built rescue vessels with appropriate equipment, and they get the most intensive training. Carrow and his colleagues also support community members who are on the water for work, for instance: coastal guardians, teams trained to respond to environmental emergencies, and even water taxi drivers and fishermen. When Carrow does his introduction at the Bamfield CNSAR course, he sums up the program’s philosophy: “We’re trying to figure out how to best support you so you can continue doing what you’re doing out there, which is rocking it,” he says. “But we want you to come home safe.”

Safety on the water includes excellent communication, and that’s a constant theme during the week at Bamfield. As the participants go through the mock rescue of the missing kayakers, Kerr constantly stresses clear communication, both on the boats and over the radio. “[We want to] get them in the habit of communicating with us,” says Kerr. “Us” means the coast guard and the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre in Victoria. For teams used to getting the job done on their own, linking into the greater coast guard’s more rigid set of protocols can take some getting used to.

One of the boats calls in to Kerr, who is rescue lead: “Exercise radio, exercise radio. This is RHIOT 2. We have a possible person in the water at four eight, five three, decimal, zero five north; one two five, zero seven, decimal, five three west.”

Kerr asks their intentions—they’ll investigate, come alongside, and pull the person out of the water—and confirms he’ll pass on the details to the rescue coordination center.

Participants in search and rescue training retrieve a manikin from the water near Robbers Passage, British Columbia.

About four minutes later, RHIOT 2 reports back that they’ve recovered Amy, that she is “cold but otherwise fine,” and that they are keeping her warm and will transport her to Bamfield for further care.

Faux kayakers safe and accounted for, the participants return to Bamfield at dusk. But the day’s exercises aren’t over yet. They have unceremoniously hauled the rescue manikins aboard during the scenario, and now it’s time to learn proper techniques. Illuminated by the spotlights on the Bamfield coast guard station dock, the men jump into the frigid Pacific and spend the next hour learning PIW—person in water—recovery techniques, taking turns being victim and rescuer.

Alec Dick, from Ahousaht, was one of the first to take the plunge with the CNSAR program back in 2016. Dick carried out emergency services for his community, so when the Leviathan II sank in 2015, his house became a command center of sorts. His living room window looked out toward the scene of the disaster, and he monitored the community boats heading out to respond. “The coast guard wasn’t on site yet,” he explains. “I was telling these guys that if you have people on board, get going to Tofino.” After the initial disaster, the community continued to help in the search for one missing person. “We did locate [him] a few days later,” he says.

Dick motions to another location visible from the beach where a float plane with three Ahousaht people on board crashed in 2010, another accident that initiated a full-on community response. A water taxi driver from the village was first on site, and his ability to pinpoint the location where the plane sank was invaluable to coast guard divers when they arrived. On the off chance someone had made it out of the plane, community members walked and boated the beaches and rocky shorelines for days after. There were no survivors, and the incident was a sobering reminder that search and rescue response in these small communities often means looking for a loved one.

Alec Dick, from the Ahousaht First Nation, has been an active participant in the Canadian Coast Guard’s Coastal Nations Search and Rescue program since it began and has been instrumental to its success. Photo by Adrienne Mason

Dick’s years of emergency response experience made him an ideal contact when the coast guard was looking to have a more formal relationship with coastal nations. “After the [Leviathan II] happened, we had a big meeting with the Canadian Coast Guard and other government people, and I was asked if I was willing to become part of the auxiliary coast guard,” he says. It was a welcome change in attitude. “I think they finally realized they need to be working with First Nations. We knew it a long time ago, that we needed to be interconnected in some way to work together.”

Ahousaht’s chief and council agreed to the coast guard’s offer to craft a program together, and Dick became one of the first to go through the Bamfield course. He’s a leader in the CNSAR program, and his instrumental role in helping to develop the program earned him a BC lieutenant governor’s award for maritime achievement. Although he leaves a lot of the responses to younger members now, he’s still fully involved in the CNSAR program as the board chair of the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary and is regularly asked to do presentations about the organization. Most recently, he spoke at a meeting of the International Maritime Rescue Federation in Victoria.

The rapport with the Canadian Coast Guard has come a long way in eight years from what “was a bare-minimum relationship, that was more or less ‘you go your way, I go my way,’ you know?” Dick says. Whether it was a change of the guard, or a change in attitude and understanding, he says that now they’re “putting trust in one another.” Adding, “it’s a working relationship … that is so rewarding for both sides.”

That working relationship was put to practice in a dramatic rescue on January 25, 2022. A water taxi en route to Ahousaht slammed into a rock, thrusting its four passengers, who were sitting on bench seats, forward into the next row, and the driver into the windscreen. The driver managed to get a Mayday out and both the Ahousaht Coast Guard Auxiliary and the Tofino-based coast guard responded. Tom Stere, rescue specialist at the Tofino station, quickly dispatched with another crewman and headed to the scene. The seas were calm, but dense fog swathed the coast, cutting visibility to just 15 meters, if that. When they arrived, the Ahousaht coast guard crew was already on site, tied alongside the damaged boat, and assessing the scene. “Because of their training, the communication was seamless,” says Stere. As senior officer, he took charge of the response and tasked the Ahousaht members with various roles. By this time, other private vessels from Ahousaht had arrived, too, ready to offer assistance as needed.

It was a chaotic scene. There were multiple injuries in a very small space filled with gear and bent seats, so extraction was challenging. The passengers had numerous broken bones, including one woman with a severely traumatized face, and the captain had a head injury. To add to the challenge, a bottle of dish soap had exploded, and the interior was slick with detergent, blood, and broken glass.

Working together, the teams extracted the passengers, got them ready for transport, and sent them to Tofino on the boats standing by. All but one of the passengers were medevacked out of Tofino for treatment.

For Stere, it was a game changer having the Ahousaht team. “To be frank, it reduced my anxiety,” he says. He knew he had competent people on scene, with the appropriate gear—first aid, stretchers, pumps, for instance—with complementary training. “They’re a critical component of our [search and rescue] response, without question,” he says.

Stere has lived in Tofino for 37 years and has been with the coast guard for 33. He’s pleased to see the new, formalized relationship and the acknowledgment that these communities have always been there to rescue people in their territorial waters. “It’s a major shift in the culture and mindset of the coast guard,” he says, adding that it’s permeating throughout the organization.

Participants from coastal First Nations in British Columbia practice boating skills during a week-long search and rescue training program.

Carrow agrees. Ever mindful that CNSAR funding could be cut with a change of government, he’s working to ensure that it’s not just Carrow and his team who have the relationships. “They need to be held throughout the coast guard, from the newest employee to the most senior executive,” he says. Exposure to the program will make its importance crystal clear, he contends. What we’re doing with CNSAR is not trivial, not lip service, he says. “[The program] is working and we’re saving lives.”

The successes of the CNSAR program spurred its expansion across Canada in 2022 with the second phase of the Oceans Protection Plan. Today, the Canadian Coast Guard has Indigenous search and rescue programs under development on the Atlantic coast and in the “central region,” which encompasses Ontario, Quebec, and the Arctic coast.

For a government that has made many promises around reconciling past injustices with First Nations people, it would be convenient to point to the CNSAR program as proof of progress, a box checked. While the initiative has clearly shown success, Carrow is cautious about using the word reconciliation lightly. True reconciliation doesn’t come with a program, he says. “It’s got to be a personal relationship.” Building relationships and trust takes time, especially with government.

After almost a decade working closely with Carrow and the CNSAR program, Dick can feel the shift. He’s experienced new levels of openness and trust, and he sees an agency committed to more meaningful involvement with First Nations. “Not just to see them, but to hear them,” he says.

Alex Baildham, center, manager of operations and training for the Coastal Nations Coast Guard Auxiliary, reviews navigation skills with, from left, Warren Aster, Gitxaała Nation; Tyrese Short, Kyuquot/Checleseht First Nations; William Smythe, Nisga’a First Nation; and Dale Robinson, Gitxaała Nation.

Acknowledging past harms and how they can reverberate for generations often takes time, too. In November 2012, after petitions by the Hesquiaht First Nation, the BC government “expressed regret” to the Hesquiaht people and the families of John Anayitzachist and Katkinna for their wrongful hangings 143 years before. The federal government also exonerated the men in 2018.

Before these apologies, in 2008, master carver Tim Paul erected a pole in honor of his relative Anayitzachist on the beach at Homais, the place where he was hanged. It depicts a shark, an octopus, and, on top, Anayitzachist. Though its vibrant blue-and-red paint has now mostly faded to silver, the pole still stands, its base carpeted by a lush growth of thimbleberry and salal. Anayitzachist looks out to sea, watching for those passing by and those who might land on this shore.

The North Sea is a hard place to love. It’s not the cold, or the silty gray-brown waters that seem to suck the brightness out of the sky that make it unappealing, it’s what people have done to it over the centuries, transforming the North Sea into an industrialized seascape.

Trade has made this sea—which washes against the United Kingdom to the west and mainland Europe to the east—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Some 1,300 passenger ferries, cargo vessels, and tankers cross the English Channel at the sea’s narrowest point every week. Commercial trawlers harvesting cod, herring, haddock, and more have scoured the seabed, causing some fish populations to decline. The fossil fuel industry has sucked 45 billion barrels of oil and gas from the bedrock beneath the United Kingdom’s territorial waters alone over the past half-century, leaving the rusting remnants of abandoned oil rigs rearing from the sea’s turbulent surface. Above the waves, the North Sea hums with dozens of wind farms, with many more to come, each one comprising hundreds of towering turbines to generate electricity and replace dwindling reserves of fossil fuels. And all this human exploitation has polluted the sea with undesirable chemicals, trash, and noise.

Once upon a time—before industrialization—the sea was filled with life. But go back further still, and the land beneath the sea itself was a vibrant ecosystem for all manner of terrestrial beings.

Evidence of the earliest human use of the North Sea region lies deep beneath the water, suspended silt, and seafloor, in the submerged territory of Doggerland that once connected the United Kingdom and mainland Europe. Before Doggerland was lost beneath rising seas, its low hills and broad valleys, braided rivers and wide estuaries, marshy wetlands and long gravel beaches were home to bear, boar, red deer, and people.

As ice melted and the sea level rose over centuries, Doggerland—between Britain and the European mainland—slowly disappeared beneath the North Sea. Illustration by Claus Lunau/Science Photo Library

Doggerland is not well known outside the field of archaeology. And historically, when archaeologists have discussed it, they considered it a land bridge connecting two more interesting places, used by people to travel between Europe and modern-day Britain around 12,000 years ago. But innovative archaeology is reframing Doggerland as a territory in which human communities lived and thrived for millennia—a place that was known, that was home to generations—until a warming climate and rising seas forced people to leave and it was forgotten. As climate change accelerates in the modern era, the story of Doggerland becomes a story of our future.

Vincent Gaffney, a jovial and unpretentious 66-year-old landscape archaeologist with close-cropped white hair and thick dark-rimmed spectacles, has spent two decades conjuring this lost land from the murky depths. Unlike most archaeologists, Gaffney has conducted his explorations without ever setting foot on his study site, which lies roughly 20 to 30 meters below the sea’s surface. Instead, his pioneering work at the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, which he founded at the University of Bradford in England, involves sifting through huge quantities of seismic survey data. The detailed 3D maps and simulations he derives from that data re-create the topography and ecological complexity of an area nearly the size of Washington State. His work disputes the dismissive assumption that Doggerland was simply an ancient thoroughfare by bringing into relief a place that was ideal for human habitation, with all the water, food, and other resources people would have needed to thrive. “Everyone called it a land bridge, something you come across or go back again,” he says. “But you don’t live on bridges.”

Gaffney was born to working-class parents in England’s northeast and, despite spending a lifetime in the rarefied world of academia, retains his gentle Geordie burr and a love of English ale. For half his career, he has been beguiled by Doggerland, the idea of a lost landscape, of an Atlantis beneath the North Sea. But Doggerland is not Atlantis; it is not even that unusual.

The world has many submerged ancient coastal shelves such as Doggerland: Beringia extends between North America and Russia; Sundaland underpins Southeast Asia; the Sahul Shelf juts out from Australia. “Coasts hold the key to the mobility of humans across the millennia,” Gaffney tells me over a pint and a pie at his favorite pub. Cumulatively, submerged coastal shelves take up about the same space as present-day North America and would have been fundamental territories for human occupation and migration. Yet they have been largely out of reach of archaeologists. “These are all massively important historical areas which you cannot understand unless you know what’s happening underneath the sea,” Gaffney says.

What makes Doggerland different from Earth’s many other submerged lands is that Gaffney has found a way to see it.

Landscape archaeologist Vince Gaffney has dedicated 20 years to bringing Doggerland into sharper relief. Photo courtesy of Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

By mapping the prehistoric land beneath the seabed and pioneering techniques for finding artifacts, Gaffney is also opening up the world’s other submerged continental shelves to remote archaeological exploration. Researchers in the Baltic Sea, elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, and in Australia, for example, are adopting his approach. The hidden coastal shelves represent a world of human habitation lost as the ice sheets began their retreat 20,000 years ago, triggering a global sea level rise of more than 120 meters. The global flooding that followed the last ice age “was the last time that humans experienced climate change at the scale we’re talking about now,” Gaffney says.

Long before Gaffney began using technology to construct renderings of Doggerland, the submerged landscape was releasing clues about its existence in shards and fragments. Victorian-era oyster dredgers and trawlers occasionally hauled up the bones of mammals such as wolves, bears, elk, reindeer, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinoceroses, along with lumps of peat known as moorlog. The fishermen commonly tossed the bones into deeper waters to prevent them from tangling nets, but some of the bones made their way into private collections and small museums. And for the past half-century, beachcombers and hobbyists searching the coastal and intertidal zones have collected harpoon tips, flint shards, and mammal bones, as well as fragments of human skulls, femurs, and jaws—and even a spearhead made from human bone—some of which have been dated back to Doggerland.

In the early 1900s, geologist and paleobotanist Clement Reid became intrigued by another mystery emerging from the sea. Stumps of drowned trees sometimes appear at very low tides along parts of the English coast. Confounded 19th-century visitors surmised they were seeing proof of divine intervention and nicknamed the stumps Noah’s Woods. In his 1913 book Submerged Forests, Reid proposed that the trees, mammal bones, and peat—which contained preserved bogbean seeds, willow leaves, and birchbark—were all evidence of a “sunken land.” He envisioned fen and forest stretching far beyond the coastline deep into the North Sea. Reid theorized that the Dogger Bank—a submerged sandbank roughly in the middle of the North Sea and named after Dutch fishing boats known as doggers—“once formed the northern edge of a great alluvial plain, occupying what is now the southern half of the North Sea, and stretching across to Holland and Denmark.” Gaffney considers Reid’s book foundational in arguing for the importance of submerged lands in prehistory.

Vindication of Reid’s argument came in 1931, when a trawler skipper split a piece of moorlog that was clogging his net and discovered a delicate 22-centimeter-long spearhead. It was finely crafted from red deer antler, notched with sawtooth barbs, and carved with a series of parallel incisions. Archaeologists later determined this artifact—the first human tool from the North Sea studied—to be 13,000 years old. Sufficient numbers of similar barbed points have been found at numerous sites along the North Sea coast that they are considered a typical technology of the Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic European time periods between 50,000 and 6,000 years ago. The spearheads were likely used by shoreline, estuary, and riverine people to hunt fish in the shallows. British academic Grahame Clark devised a theory of human migration based partly on that spearhead discovered in 1931; in it, he characterized the region that later became known as Doggerland as a land bridge (though the term would come later), and the reputation stuck.

Archaeology grew as a new discipline through the 20th century, yet there was so much to explore on land that looking beneath the sea hardly seemed a worthwhile pursuit. Doggerland, only just glimpsed, slipped from view. Artifacts continued to turn up, but these chance finds, collected and catalogued by museum curators, lacked the context for anyone to make sense of them.

The scientist who turned attention back to the North Sea was Bryony Coles, a professor emeritus of prehistoric archaeology at the United Kingdom’s University of Exeter, who published a seminal, if esoteric, paper titled “Doggerland: a Speculative Survey” in 1998. In the paper, Coles reinterpreted existing discoveries and literature. The general consensus among archaeologists at that point was that Doggerland was too difficult to study because it was underwater and unimportant because it was a thoroughfare. Coles reframed it as a place of significance. The artifacts were, she wrote, reminders that “the area of the present North Sea has been land in the past, and land that people knew.” Her paper gave Doggerland its name and its first tentative, theoretical maps consistent with what Reid had proposed. “Instead of focusing on land as bridge, we focus on land as a place to be,” she wrote. Doing so meant reinstating an erased people in both time and place, and restoring a lost history. Coles reframed Doggerland as a vast, populated plain that was the heartland of northwest Europe.

Coles changed the way archaeologists thought about Doggerland, but what kind of “a place to be” was it? That question would set Gaffney off on a decades-long quest for answers.

As Coles drafted her paper on Doggerland’s watery past, Gaffney’s feet were firmly on dry ground. In the 1990s, he was experimenting with using GIS to conduct a kind of noninvasive archaeology that explored larger areas than could practically be excavated by hand. One of his early projects showed the hidden extent of a Roman city in Shropshire, in the west of England. He used similar techniques to map the landscape surrounding Stonehenge, the 5,000-year-old stone circle that is perhaps the most famous archaeological site in Britain.

At England’s University of Birmingham in 2001, Gaffney was teaching a postgraduate seminar on places that lie beyond the reach of archaeologists—“landscapes we could do nothing with,” as he puts it—when the North Sea came up in discussion with a graduate student named Simon Fitch who had previously studied geology. They wondered whether 3D seismic data collected for fossil fuel exploration could be used to create a detailed topographical map of the unseen landscape beneath the waves, but the question seemed moot. “The problem was, which oil and gas company would talk to us?” says Gaffney.

Seismic surveys of the ocean are carried out by boats: they emit soundwaves toward the seabed, and hydrophones record the seismic waves that reflect off and travel through the different materials beneath the surface. The surveys cost tens of millions of dollars per project and result in an X-ray image—a 3D picture of rock types, stratigraphy, and sediments that help identify potential crude deposits. The use of the technique is a worthwhile investment for multinational oil companies but is far beyond the budget of ordinary archaeology departments.

Gaffney and his colleague Ken Thomson (now deceased) examine an early 3D visualization of Doggerland on a stereoscopic screen. Photo courtesy of Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

Gaffney and Fitch needed an introduction. They convinced a colleague who had experience working in basin geomorphology for the oil industry to help; together, they visited Petroleum Geo-Services (PGS), which acquires seismic data and compiles it into what it calls “MegaSurveys.” The company agreed, free of charge, to provide some data with which Gaffney and Fitch could attempt to create a prototype map, with the caveat that it would be “not very much, only 6,000 square kilometers.” Gaffney was stunned: his survey of Stonehenge, the largest archaeological geophysical survey in Britain at the time, had covered less than 15 square kilometers.

Gaffney used a bank of powerful computers to process the data, projecting the images onto a home cinema-sized stereoscopic screen, which he viewed through a pair of retro-futuristic wraparound 3D glasses. It took months, but gradually the land emerged on the screen, creating a portal to a lost world. The seismic data “took us deep into the Paleolithic,” he says. The images revealed the contours and outlines of ancient valleys beneath 12,000-year-old rivers. It was proof of concept that seismic data can be used to expose submerged lands. PGS donated another 19,000 square kilometers of data. The thin 30- to 40-meter top layer interested Gaffney most because it corresponds to the period when the glaciers were melting. European ice sheets had retreated northward over thousands of years as temperatures rose. Glaciers gave way to barren, windswept tundra and permafrost. Then, rivers and streams, lakes, estuaries, salt marshes, hills, and valleys began to appear, transforming the land into an ecosystem where people would have been able to survive in Doggerland for the first time as the warmer geological epoch of the Holocene began 11,700 years ago.

Armed with his new 3D visualizations, Gaffney plunged headlong into Doggerland, eager to seize the opportunity to discover this long-forgotten landscape. His ultimate goal is to determine where and how the people of Doggerland lived. Over the years, he has amassed astonishing quantities of seismic data, using it to expand and add detail and texture to his maps. With the maps, he has been able to identify where plants and animals likely lived, edging him ever closer to finding direct evidence of human habitation, such as settlements, houses, pits made for ritual or domestic purposes, or dense collections of animal bones or flint tools. He has rented research vessels to conduct high-resolution 2D seismic surveys that measure in centimeters instead of meters to add even more detailed information to the maps; deployed submarine cameras and mechanical dredges to bring up samples of seabed deposits; and extracted nearly 100 sediment cores, which have provided a wealth of information. Each core is collected by driving a 10-centimeter-diameter tube deep into the seabed. The extracted cylinder of peat, sand, chalk, and other material can then be radiocarbon dated, slice by slice, and read as a timeline of dynamically shifting habitats. The cores also contain ancient environmental DNA that can be analyzed to show what lived on the land.

The work has involved occasional seasickness. And endless funding bids. Gaffney has managed to carry out such an extensive investigation of Doggerland, running a series of collaborative projects for the past 20 years, because a wide range of sources have supported the work. The UK government, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Union are among his funders. His most recent grant is the biggest yet: a European Research Council-funded project called SUBNORDICA for investigating the entire southern North Sea and parts of the Baltic Sea, worth €13-million (US $13.7-million). “In archaeological terms, it’s like we’ve robbed a bank,” says Gaffney.

Researchers Thomas Mestdagh, left, and Ruth Plets, right, from the Flanders Marine Institute in Belgium, and James Walker, center, from the Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, sort through material dredged from the North Sea’s floor, looking for artifacts from Doggerland. Photo by Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

He focuses on estuaries and rivers, such as the submerged Southern River, 30 kilometers off the eastern coast of England. It was a waterway that sprang from peat soil, cut through a chalk outcrop, and drained into a large estuary—precisely the kind of place where people would have congregated and where sediments accumulate. Robin Allaby, an evolutionary geneticist at Warwick University in the United Kingdom, has taken hundreds of teaspoon-sized samples from Gaffney’s sediment cores and sequenced the DNA in each one. “The bottom of the sea is basically a constant four degrees [Celsius]—more or less a fridge—which is ideal [for preserving organic matter],” he says.

Allaby’s samples contain 574 taxa of plants and reveal rapid colonization by plants, with a leap in biodiversity just before the start of the Holocene. The Southern River, for example, was characterized by marshland and seagrass at the estuary, rising into grassland and deciduous woods that were predominantly willow with alder, elm, hazel, wingnut, and oak. By the Holocene, Doggerland was “basically a northern temperate forest biome,” Allaby says, “a very inhabitable landscape,” full of resources and opportunities for humans.

Doggerland’s low-lying mosaic of fish-rich waters, wetlands, hills, and animal-filled woods was an ideal environment for foragers who thrived where food sources were diverse. So far, little is known of the lifestyles of Doggerland’s inhabitants, but there is plenty of evidence from today’s coastal Mesolithic sites in the United Kingdom and Europe, areas that were the outer reaches of Doggerland before its inundation between 20,000 and 7,500 years ago. Here, people lived in small bands or larger communities; made tools from stone; felled wood for fuel and construction of simple houses; foraged plants, nuts, and seeds; caught fish in rivers and the shallow sea; and hunted animals, butchered them for food, and used their skins for clothing and their bones and antlers for fishing harpoons, weapons, and ritual objects. When faced with scarcity, mobility is the fundamental survival strategy for foraging people, but when resources are plentiful, they stay put. Archaeologists have found Mesolithic settlements, as well as burial sites, all around the North Sea’s present-day coastline, which suggests the only reason they have not found them in Doggerland is because those sites are beneath the sea. Gaffney aims to fill this archaeological lacuna.

Doggerland was a land of plenty, but it was dynamic too, and this would eventually prove catastrophic. Within 14,000 years of emerging from the ice, Doggerland was submerged. Its gradual inundation is documented in the marine sediment and in the DNA, which shows that salt marshes crept ever farther up the freshwater Southern River over time.

At the University of Bradford, Gaffney’s colleague Phil Murgatroyd feeds all of this astonishing detail into a computer simulation that allows users to navigate a changing landscape over time, observing the interactions of plants, animals, and people. The data, says Gaffney, is “the backdrop, but the real output is visualization.” Murgatroyd’s model is the gamification of science: complex data that looks like Minecraft’s blocky 3D world and is navigated using an Xbox controller.

“These landscapes were named and loved”—just like the places people live in and know today—says Gaffney, “and climate change destroyed that. We should be aware of that, and we should have a better relationship with these landscapes. Phil’s work is the start of humanizing that landscape.”

A computer simulation of Doggerland allows users to navigate a changing landscape over time. Visualization by Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

Gaffney’s team at the University of Bradford is also analyzing a new set of sediment cores and other material collected in 2024, hoping to find traces of human presence, activity, or even settlement. Inspired by the search for extraterrestrial life on planets where conditions are not too hot and not too cold but just right, Gaffney has used his maps and the analysis of sedimentary DNA to zoom in on specific areas where people most likely had the right conditions to thrive, targeting them for remote exploration. “To find something, we need to have a place where it exists, where it is preserved, and where it is accessible. That’s the Goldilocks Zone for doing archaeology in the North Sea,” he says. “Accessible” is the tricky variable when it comes to submerged landscapes beyond the intertidal zone.

Yet Gaffney and his colleagues are optimistic because they have succeeded before, says Simon Fitch, sliding a little takeout box across the table toward me. Nestled inside is a small fragment of a handworked flint dredged from the Southern River in 2019. The team had lowered a mechanical grapple 30 meters to the seafloor and dug to a depth of about 10 centimeters to find it. Dark and shiny on one side where it was buried, rusty red on the exposed side, the flint is smooth and light with beveled edges and fits neatly in the palm of my hand. “It’s the edge of a hammerstone,” Fitch says with a grin, “the first directly prospected find from the North Sea.” Fitch explains that hammerstones were used in the manufacture of other simple stone tools, such as sharp flakes for cutting, and that this one was found close to a chalk cliff, which “suggests guys were going there to tool up.” The site may have been a kind of stone tool factory.

Until now, archaeologists have only ever found artifacts from far out at sea by chance—caught in a net or washed up on a beach—so the hammerstone is a breakthrough for archaeology and for Doggerland because it put people on the map and gave archaeologists reason to keep looking. “We had a landscape, we had dynamism, we had vegetation, but the thing that had been lost was the people,” says Gaffney. The flint changed that.

In 2019, Gaffney and his team prospected their first artifact from the North Sea—the hammerstone modeled here. Visualization by Submerged Landscapes Research Centre, University of Bradford

The approach of identifying a promising site and then hauling up material from a particular place is not the only technique being developed at the University of Bradford. In another room in the archaeology department, Gaffney’s colleagues sit at computers: Murgatroyd is working on his simulation; Ben Urmston explores the use of marine magnetometry to identify where people created structures such as fire pits or post holes; and Andrew Fraser is training AI and running machine learning programs to sift through the immense and ever-expanding data sets.

The work of Gaffney and his colleagues has been pioneering, says Luc Amkreutz at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities who, in 2021, curated an exhibition of Doggerland’s many found artifacts and edited the book that followed. “It is tremendously important as it creates an awareness of the existence of a past landscape by resurfacing it, texturizing it, materializing it with rivers, lakes, hills, marshes, and coastline,” he tells me. “It creates a canvas for a populated world, the traces of which we document on our beaches and in our fishing nets.” To see Doggerland as a land bridge is to look at it from a narrow, contemporary perspective, constrained by present-day coastlines and modern settlement patterns. But to understand Doggerland as a lived and lost landscape is to consider it on its own terms.

One summer afternoon, I wade into the North Sea off the Norfolk coast and swim out a little way toward Doggerland. Out of my depth in the bracing sea, I imagine the seabed dry and planted firmly beneath my feet, the shore a low escarpment marking the farthest reaches of a familiar landscape. As Doggerland disappeared, the people living there would have slowly departed as their home became uninhabitable, venturing into a new, lesser-known land.

Unlike people today, early Holocene people lived within the limits of nature and the lands they inhabited: when resources were scarce, they adapted; when a changing climate caused sea levels to rise, they migrated to new lands. Faced with anthropogenic climate change, migration is, once again, a solution for those whose lives become unlivable, but in a crowded and unequal world, it is hard, contested, and political.

“The story of how Doggerland turned into the North Sea teaches us that we are vulnerable and that we are not above, but are dependent on, nature,” says Emilie Reuchlin, a Dutch marine biologist, political scientist, and cofounder of the Doggerland Foundation conservation organization. “It shows us how destructive climate change can be. Doggerland teaches us humility.”

As Doggerland was diminished by rising seas, the landmass shrank to become an archipelago, then a single island, before the last hilltop became the shallow Dogger Bank. By 6,000 years ago, this once varied, resource-rich land had flooded entirely, and the last of its human inhabitants had moved to higher land to the east and west.

Doggerland is a reminder that the world is not static, that the landscape we know today is different from what it was in the past and will not remain the same in the future. Doggerland’s disappearance is also a reminder of humanity’s reliance on and subordination to nature; its message is to adapt to, nurture, and protect the environments we depend upon.

With the landscape in this state of constant evolution, Gaffney worries about the past slipping out of view. An irony of his work is that Doggerland was revealed thanks to seismic data from the fossil fuel extraction that is driving the climate change that threatens us all. But the renewable wind energy crucial to reaching net-zero targets also threatens to put Doggerland out of reach forever, beneath a tangle of undersea cables, anchors, pilings, and safety exclusion zones that could make sampling and dredging impossible. Thousands of wind turbines are already operational, with many thousands more to come as Europe looks to the wind-whipped North Sea to generate more and more of its electricity.

New wind power projects in the North Sea pose both challenges and opportunities for archaeologists gathering data on Doggerland. Photo by NAPA/Alamy Stock Photo

Gaffney sees opportunity as well as threat in the wind energy infrastructure, however. Like the oil fields, wind farm developments produce tremendous quantities of new data about the geology of the shallow seabed as part of their site surveys. That information could deepen the understanding of Doggerland. Gaffney’s ambition is to persuade wind farm developers and national governments of Doggerland’s importance as a site of natural and cultural heritage, and to convince them of the need to share the data and allow archaeology to be carried out before new wind farms are built and access to the seabed is curtailed. “This is a time-limited opportunity to understand some of the last great unexplored [formerly] habitable landscapes on Earth, and we’re only just cracking the code,” says Gaffney.

Scientists expect global warming will cause sea levels to rise by up to one meter by 2100, and then will keep rising as temperatures continue to increase and ice sheets continue to melt. Coastal areas are highly populated today, as they were thousands of years ago.

The questions raised by the study of Doggerland, about how to adapt and survive when the climate changes, are being asked again in the 21st century. How many people called Doggerland home and how many were forced to migrate when their adaptive skills could no longer keep up with the pace of environmental change is not yet known, but today there are an estimated 190 million people living on land that will likely be underwater by the end of this century. How will we adapt? Where will we go?

SpaceX has pinned the bulk of its future value on orbital data centers. Not rockets. Not spacecraft.

Instead, it envisions launching and maintaining a constellation of 1 million satellites capable of generating 120 GW to power tens of millions—and potentially up to 100 million—frontier-class GPUs for data center services.

The company's founder, Elon Musk, revealed plans for this massive constellation months ago, but until recently, the scope of the individual satellites was largely unknown. That changed in June, when Musk and Ian Dahl, director of satellite engineering for SpaceX, spoke in a promotional video about the company's plans to develop the first iteration of an orbital data center, called an AI1 satellite. The video finally provided the company's numbers about the satellite's size and power capabilities.

Read full article

Comments

SpaceX has pinned the bulk of its future value on orbital data centers. Not rockets. Not spacecraft.

Instead, it envisions launching and maintaining a constellation of 1 million satellites capable of generating 120 GW to power tens of millions—and potentially up to 100 million—frontier-class GPUs for data center services.

The company's founder, Elon Musk, revealed plans for this massive constellation months ago, but until recently, the scope of the individual satellites was largely unknown. That changed in June, when Musk and Ian Dahl, director of satellite engineering for SpaceX, spoke in a promotional video about the company's plans to develop the first iteration of an orbital data center, called an AI1 satellite. The video finally provided the company's numbers about the satellite's size and power capabilities.

Read full article

Comments

Greetings, Arsians, and welcome to the great Ars Technica 2026 reader survey! It has been almost four years since we last ran a big site-wide survey like this, where we ask our readers—you!—what you like about the work we do and what we could perhaps improve on. This kind of check-in is absolutely vital to ensuring we're steering the ship properly, and we take the results very seriously. (The last time we did this, we got several thousand responses, and that's incredibly valuable data for us!)

You don't have to have been a reader since 1998 to weigh in, either. Whether you're a first-time reader, an old grizzled forum veteran, a front page comment maven, a newbie sysadmin, or a CEO, we want to hear what you have to say, no matter who you are. The only requirement is that you're a human! (Aliens are welcome as well, though we didn't really define any demographic categories for extraterrestrial beings. We'll tackle this issue if it comes up, I suppose.) There are a few text fields. Yes, we will read what you write there!

To assay, perchance to sing

Fortunately, this isn't a long survey—just a handful of targeted questions. We're not collecting any personally identifying information, and responses will only be viewed in aggregate. None of the data will be analyzed by anyone except us, and none of it will be sold or otherwise distributed outside of Ars. (We're using SurveyMonkey for our survey platform, the same as we have many times in the past.)

Read full article

Comments

Proponents see offshore launch as an answer to crowded ranges, military resilience concerns.

The post Spaceport crunch reviving interest in sea-based launch appeared first on SpaceNews.

NASA unveiled plans in March to develop a lunar base as part of its “Ignition” event that outlined the agency’s new direction in human spaceflight. The plans, though, were rather […]

The post New Glenn forced an explosive rewrite for NASA’s plans to build a moon base appeared first on SpaceNews.

Once rare beasts, billion-dollar startups are multiplying across new orbital markets.

The post Rounding up the space unicorns appeared first on SpaceNews.

Author(s): Niayesh Afshordi, Phil Halper, Matteo Rini, and Michael Schirber

One of the largest physics surveys ever conducted finds respondents divided on most topics. Surprisingly, some “textbook” answers only racked up a minority of votes.

[Physics 19, 34] Published Tue May 12, 2026