✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

How we used gigabytes of shipping data to show risks to endangered whales | NPR Visuals + News Apps

blog.apps.npr.org · 2,526 words · saved by 1 readers

Hi, I’m Chiara Eisner, an investigative reporter for NPR. In November, NPR published an investigation that revealed the lack of U.S. government and industry protections for Rice’s whales, one of the rarest marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps the whole ocean. At a known population of just 51 whales, experts calculate that the loss of more than a single whale every 15 years could lead to the extinction of the species. Among the most significant human threats to Rice’s whales is collisions with large ships. But in 2023, the U.S. agency responsible for protecting the whales, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, declined to put a speed limit in place to force ships to slow down in a part of the whales’ habitat. A speed limit is already in place in the East Coast, to protect the endangered North Atlantic Right whales, a whale species with about seven times more members alive than Rice’s whales. All vessels over 65 feet long are required to slow down to

Loading... Hi, I’m Chiara Eisner, an investigative reporter for NPR. In November, NPR published an investigation that revealed the lack of U.S. government and industry protections for Rice’s whales, one of the rarest marine mammals in the Gulf of Mexico, and perhaps the whole ocean. At a known population of just 51 whales, experts calculate that the loss of more than a single whale every 15 years could lead to the extinction of the species. Among the most significant human threats to Rice’s whales is collisions with large ships. But in 2023, the U.S. agency responsible for protecting the whale

Explore this link on the map →

saved by

related reading