Not all hydroelectric power has to come from dams.
Today, about 20 percent of the world’s power is hydroelectric. Nearly all of that water-generated energy is made by forcing rivers to flow through dams. But rivers make up just a small percentage of the water in the world. The ocean, however, occupies... 
Matt McClain, a veteran surfer and environmentalist, looks back at his first love.
I was initially drawn to the ocean by the lure of waves. My youth was spent waiting for those moments when storms would send thick gray slabs marching down the coast, stacked upon one another like corduroy, all the way to the... 
The legendary scientist Sylvia Earle explains why we need to take care of the ocean that takes care of us.
Perplexed, I drove back and forth along a stretch of Highway 1 in the Florida Keys, looking for a place I had been to many times, a shallow bay of clear water bordered by red mangroves. With mask and flippers, I had... 
Hopping a freighter to travel the world isn’t just the stuff of fiction.
Freighter World Cruises offers sea travel, the old-fashioned way. You can hitch a ride to the fjords of Norway on a mail ship, or go around the world on a massive cargo vessel for as little as $90 a day. We talked to Joycene Deel, the... 
Don’t treat it like trash, and plastic becomes a lot more interesting.
In 1947, Thor Heyerdahl and a crew of five men crossed the Pacific Ocean on the Kon-Tiki, a craft comprised of natural materials and modeled after ancient Incan rafts. This summer, David de Rothschild, the banking scion and the founder of Adventure... 
Don’t call him a treasure hunter.
Greg Stemm heads Odyssey Marine Exploration, one of the most successful shipwreck-exploration companies in the world. In 2007, it discovered a shipwreck site that yielded a haul of coins that some estimates value at $500 million. The site's location is a closely guarded... 
Don Walsh has been deeper in the ocean than any other living person. He explains how shallow our oceanic knowledge really is.
In the late 1950s, a team of marine scientists approached the Navy with a bathyscaphe— a device capable of diving much deeper than any submersible then in existence—named the Trieste. With the goal of... 
A visual history of the water gun, by Jason Polan. Click here for the full size image. For more content from GOOD's Water issue, click the banner below.
Atlantis never sank—it just became Cuba.
The fabled city of Atlantis was first mentioned by Plato in two of his dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. Plato tells of an island nation outside the entrance to the Mediterranean that several thousand years earlier had attempted to invade Athens before being destroyed in a giant... 
In the book, futuristic suits let people live in the desert—but would they really work?
As you might guess, Frank Herbert’s seminal science-fiction novel Dune takes place in an arid environment. In fact, the fictional planet Arrakis is so strapped for water that the people who inhabit its open deserts wear elaborate full-body... 
