TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Water driven back by powerful winds drained from Tampa Bay as Hurricane Ian approached Florida’s Gulf Coast on Wednesday, and some dared to venture out on the exposed bay floor.
Ian eventually made landfall as a major hurricane near Fort Myers, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the south.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Oil and natural gas spills from tankers and pipelines in U.S. waters dropped dramatically from the last decade of the 1990s to the one from 2010 through 2019, according to a federal report Wednesday.
HAVANA (AP) — Hurricane Ian was growing stronger as it barreled toward Cuba on a track to hit Florida’s west coast as a major hurricane as early as Wednesday.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — It’s been more than a century since a major storm like Hurricane Ian has struck the Tampa Bay area, which blossomed from a few hundred thousand people in 1921 to more than 3 million today.
KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) — The Southernmost Point marker in Key West, Florida, a landmark delineating the continental United States’ southernmost spot of land, became a memorial to Queen Elizabeth II on Friday when city workers installed a British flag and royal purple banner at the much-photographed site beside the Atlantic Ocean.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The U.S. Department of the Interior said Monday that it wants to reverse some Trump administration rollbacks of offshore safety rules to prevent blowouts like the BP catastrophe that killed 11 people and fouled the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — A military veteran pleaded guilty in federal court Monday to faking his own death off the Alabama coast to try to avoid sexual abuse charges in Mississippi.
Jacob Blair Scott pleaded guilty to charges of sending a false distress call that led to a Coast Guard search; illegally shipping weapons across state lines and giving false information, according to court records.
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The U.S. oil industry hit a legal roadblock in January when a judge struck down a $192 million oil and natural gas lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico over future global warming emissions from burning the fuels.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A judge’s order that forced the Biden administration to resume sales of oil and gas leases on federal land and waters was vacated Wednesday by a federal appeals court in New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Drought made the Mississippi River sluggish and led to a smaller than average dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico — an area where there’s too little oxygen to support marine life, the scientist who's been measuring it for decades said Wednesday.
BELLE CHASSE, La. (AP) — Louisiana has completed one of its biggest coastal restoration projects yet, and is at work on even bigger ones.
CHAUVIN, La. (AP) — Sliding off the side of her small boat, seabird biologist Bonnie Slaton wades through waist-high water, brown pelicans soaring overhead, until she reaches the shores of Raccoon Island.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — President Joe Biden's administration on Friday proposed up to 10 oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and one off the Alaska coast over the next five years — going against the Democrat's climate promises but scaling back a Trump-era plan that called for dozens of offshore drilling opportunities including in undeveloped areas.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Scientists are trying to get a better estimate of greater amberjack populations in the South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico, and this means the chance at a $250 catch for anglers.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Tropical storm warnings were issued Friday for much of the Florida peninsula, Cuba and the Bahamas as a system that battered Mexico moves through the Gulf of Mexico, killing at least two in Cuba and bringing threats of heavy rain and wind for the weekend.
Batten down the hatches for another nasty hurricane season.
Nearly every natural force and a bunch of human-caused ones — more than just climate change — have turned the last several Atlantic hurricane seasons into deadly and expensive whoppers.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is canceling three oil and gas lease sales scheduled in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, removing millions of acres from possible drilling as U.S.
Roughly 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick, a whaling ship from Massachusetts sank near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Nearly 190 years later, experts say, it’s still the only whaler known to have gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of enslavement at Southern ports posed a risk for Black and mixed-race men who often were part of whaling crews.
A plane carrying former President Donald Trump was forced to make an emergency landing in New Orleans last weekend after suffering engine failure over the Gulf of Mexico.
The details of the emergency landing, first reported by Politico, were confirmed Wednesday by a person familiar with the incident who was not authorized to speak publicly about it and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — In a story published March 3, 2022, about a United Nations report on extreme weather around the Gulf of Mexico, The Associated Press erroneously reported that Florida has the longest coastline of any state.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden has an opportunity for a reset on climate policy after a federal judge rejected an administration plan to lease millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil drilling.
WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal court has rejected a plan to lease millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico for offshore oil drilling, saying the Biden administration did not adequately take into account the lease sale's effect on planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, violating a bedrock environmental law.
CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) — The ashes of Winter the dolphin were returned to the sea on Thursday, about two months after the beloved marine mammal of movie fame died at a Florida aquarium.
Clearwater Marine Aquarium staff members released a Himalayan sea salt urn containing Winter's ashes into the Gulf of Mexico from the back of a U.S.
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — A new federal regulation requires higher safety standards for pipelines carrying oil and other hazardous liquids through the Great Lakes region, marine coastal waters and beaches, officials said Thursday.
CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) — A Florida aquarium has created a legacy for its famed Winter the Dolphin following her recent death, including virtual reality encounters with the prosthetic-tailed star of the Dolphin Tale movies.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Energy companies including Shell, BP, Chevron and ExxonMobil offered a combined $192 million for drilling rights on federal oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, as the first government lease auction under President Joe Biden laid bare the hurdles he faces to reach climate goals dependent on deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions.
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The U.S. Interior Department on Wednesday will auction vast oil and gas reserves in the Gulf of Mexico estimated to hold up to 1.1 billion barrels of crude, the first such sale under President Joe Biden and a harbinger of the challenges he faces to reach climate goals that depend on deep cuts in fossil fuel emissions.