Bill Viola’s Ocean Without a Shore, Venice Biennale (2007), which takes its title from the Andalucian Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), is about the threshold between life and death or, as the artist has commented: ‘the presence of the dead in our lives’. 

Located on the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway, Acoustic Ocean sets out to explore the sonic ecology of marine life. The scientist as an explorer and important mediator of the contemporary understanding of our planetary ecosystems is a central figure in this video. She makes her appearance in the person of a Sami (indigenous of northern Scandinavia) biologist-diver who is using all sorts of hydrophones, parabolic mics and recording devices. Her task is to sense the submarine space for acoustic and other biological forms of expression. Sonic manifestations are vital modes of communication, navigation and survival for a great majority of deep-sea beings. Given the poor visibility in the deep sea, the sonic dimension is the primary means of communication, navigation and survival in this penumbral liquid universe.

The New York Times shows how the internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word.

Writing in e-flux Journal #90 (April 2018), Aileen Moreton-Robinson argues that the production of the beach as a white possession is both fantasy and reality within the Australian imagination and is tied to a beach culture encompassing pleasure, leisure, and national pride that developed during modernity through the embodied performance of white masculinity. 

Sea Change takes you on an evocative journey into the secret life of an almost unknown ecosystem: the beautiful kelp forest of Southern Africa

Produced by the Australian Natonal Film Board, The Pearlers (1949) looks at pearling in the late 1940s. It goes on board the boats that work off the coast of Broome, Western Australia, from March to December each year. The film captures the atmosphere, the detail and the danger involved in the search for shell as the divers in huge metal helmets and layers of clothing under their suits dive two at a time, each with one person tending their airhose and another their lifeline.

Architecture firm BIG designs Oceanix City, with Oceanix – a company that develops innovate ways to build on water, working with MIT's Center for Ocean Engineering. The city is made up of buoyant islands clustered together in groups of six to form villages. These clusters would then be repeated in multiples of six to form a 12-hectare village for 1 650 residents, and then again to form an archipelago home to 10 000 citizens.

Legends speculate that around 600 shipwrecks dot Goa's seabed. According to Centro Nacional de Arqueologia Nautica e Subaquatica (CNANS), Lisbon, several Portuguese ships capsized off the Indian coast between 1497 and 1612. Most of them capsized in the waters off Goa due to storms, hidden reefs and sandbars.

By South African duo Batuk, made up of Spoek Mathambo and Manteiga. The music video for 'Deep Ocean Deep' is an ethereal mermaid fantasy, referencing Xhosa figure Mamlambo, who lives in the deep sea.

By South African choreographer and dancer Oupa Sibeko. Filmed at Muizenberg Beach, June 2015.

Each year, more than 11 billion tons of stuff gets carried around the world by large ships. Clothes, flat-screen TVs, grain, cars, oil — transporting these goods from port to port is what makes the global economy go round. Now there's a great way to visualize this entire process, through this stunning interactive map from the UCL Energy Institute.

A steady increase in ocean temperatures was all it took to doom the once-luxuriant giant kelp forests of eastern Australia and Tasmania. Then, a warm-water sea urchin species moved in. Voracious grazers, the invaders have mowed down much of the remaining vegetation and, over vast areas, have formed what scientists call urchin barrens, bleak marine environments largely devoid of life.

Reexamining the ocean’s historic and superficial remoteness, this issue profiles the ocean as contemporary urban space and subject of material, political, and ecologic significance, asking how we are shaping it, and how it is shaping us.

By Gideon Mendel. Since 2007, Mendel has been occupied with Drowning World, an art and advocacy project about flooding that is his personal response to climate change.

Pacific Aquarium responds to the pressing concerns of ecology and economy in the Pacific Ocean in a series of nine projects. Each project constructs a section of a world in which the externalities of resource exploitation and climate change are weaved into spatial scales, temporalities, and species beyond the human.

In November of 2003, about 30 great white sharks were tagged off of the coast of South Africa. Most of the sharks stayed near Africa, but one of these sharks, named Nicole, really surprised researchers when she traveled all the way to Australia.