Virginians are estimated to go through about 3 billion single-use plastic bags each year, most used for minutes at a time. A new effort in Virginia Beach aims to make the bags less appealing by levying a 5-cent fee.

Congress banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808. But the domestic slave trade — trading humans within the nation’s borders, dubbed “the Second Middle Passage” — continued through the Civil War and is much less discussed in American history. The Norfolk region sent more than 21,000 enslaved people to New Orleans — more than any other port, according to the new research of a Slover librarian.

Southeastern Virginia is expected to see between 15-18 inches of relative sea level rise by 2050. About a third of that is because of land subsidence, which is uneven across the region.

The Norfolk Dry Dock Affair of the early 1830s, as it became known, brings up “something that people don’t think about when they think about slavery: slaves in a city setting," said Diane Cripps, curator of history at the Portsmouth history museums. An upcoming Black History Month presentation delves into the episode.

"Ahoy My name is Charlie, I am 14 in 8th grade" at a school in New Jersey, reads one message in a bottle on display at the new Nauticus exhibit through April 24. "Please write back. Anchors Away Semper Fi.”

The “400 Years Forward Bus Tour” starts Friday, Feb. 11. Stops will include the Fort Monroe Visitor & Education Center, a guided tour of the Hampton History Museum and a libation ceremony at the 1619 memorial site on the fort. Another tour is scheduled for the end of the month.

“Climate change is real and the city of Norfolk is acknowledging that and doing our best to figure out how to both mitigate the causes of climate change and also mitigate its impacts on us,” said environmental sustainability manager Esi Langston. “Energy reduction is a huge way to do that.”

A lot of solutions needed along the coast — aquaculture technology, for example, or developing unmanned submersible vehicles to repair offshore wind infrastructure — lend themselves well to the technical expertise for which the Blacksburg campus is known, said Michael Schwarz, associate director of the Center for Coastal Studies and director of the existing seafood research center.

A coalition of The Nature Conservancy, the University of Virginia and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science under William & Mary are working with the state to launch the first carbon credit program linked to seagrass. It would allow anyone interested to purchase credits to offset carbon emissions, with the money feeding back into research and management.