When Dan Killam was a little boy he saw the ocean as a world of its own, filled with mysteries to be discovered. His parents nurtured his natural curiosity with regular trips to aquariums and zoos.

Satellite images of the South China Sea show man-made scarring of coral reefs on a scale heretofore unappreciated, much of which occurred between 2012 and late 2015. The scarring, resulting from ...