Welcome to “Exploring our Oceans” 5.0

Dear all

 

Welcome to the fifth run of the University of Southampton MOOC “Exploring our Oceans”. The course starts on the 23rd January, 2017 and the team is looking forward to welcoming a new group of learners. We have collated the feedback from previous runs of this course into the image above, and hope that this run of the MOOC will help answer some questions about the ocean, and develop your understanding of the complex issues affecting our oceans.

 

This course runs for four weeks, and covers a broad range of topics relating to the oceans. We start  by exploring how well we know the oceans, how much has been mapped, and a history of mapping the ocean floor. The Ocean floor contains a wide variety of features, more diverse than the surface, and you can explore some of them through this video, which shows the surface of the earth with no water.

 

During week two we will cover how cariations in temperature and salinity govern the circulation of the oceans, and discuss why the sea is salty, and how tides affect our daily lives. Here is a great video form NASA to illustrate how dynamic the ocean currents are.

 

Week three introduces you to some of the inhabitants of the ocean and how we develop further understanding of their lifestyles and what happens when we discover a new species. Many people are fascinated by the Bathynomus giganteus we use as a course image, you can see footage of live isopods here.

 

Week four is a discussion on how we interact with the oceans, the resources they hold and future challenges associated with mining. We have several facilitators who work in this area and it should be a fascinating week, look out for their blog posts detailing the ongoing work at Southampton to ensure development is sustainable.

 

Are you joining us for the MOOC? Is there anything you are particularly interested in learning more about? If you have not enrolled yet, it is not too late, you can join at any time, active discussions are hosted within each week, we are excited to meet the new cohort of learners next week!

 

Millie