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Polar marine biology

This week the course focused on marine life. How diverse, abundant and adaptable it is. However, there is one region where life has to deal with extra challenges. A changing light system, from 24 hours of sunlight to complete darkness for months, harsh sub-zero conditions and changes to the composition of seawater from the freezing and thawing of ice. This is of course the Polar Regions (Arctic in the north and the Antarctic in the south). Continue reading →

Tracing Metals

Tracing metals I love the ocean, studying it, and before joining the University of Southampton as a Research fellow, I had put much thought into the particular role of shelf seas in the global marine system. In previous years I have put my focus on the deep ocean. I have been analysing trace metals in seawater to look at the big picture – how water masses with billions of liters per second are distributed along the ocean conveyor belt. Continue reading →

The Treacle Ocean

When you think of ocean oceanography you probably think of people diving with corals or boats deploying brightly coloured equipment. I myself am a physical oceanographer and personally don’t get my feet wet very often. So what do I do? Well, I model the ocean using a computer… a big one!   The ocean is very complex and understanding the whole ocean to predict how it will respond to changing climate is very difficult. Continue reading →

Shedding more light on bioluminescence

Bioluminescence is the emission of light from a biological organism and was wonderfully introduced from a Ted talk by Edith Widder (if you haven’t seen it you can find the link here). The idea of this blog post was to dive deeper into bioluminescence and provide some more information on this amazing and beautiful process. The first question you may have is, “how is the light produced?” and the answer to this is chemistry. Continue reading →

World Tsunami Awareness Day

This year, the 5th of November, will mark the first "World Tsunami Awareness Day", an international effort, spearheaded by the UN to raise awareness of an often underappreciated risk. We are all familiar with the recent deadly tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan, the Boxing Day earthquake was the most deadly disaster in decades, responsible for the deaths of over 260 000 people. Continue reading →

Our new look course is live!

A warm welcome to you, whether you have arrived here via the FutureLearn course or by some other route across the internet!   The University of Southampton with FutureLearn ran its first Massive Open Online Course in Oceanography – Exploring our Oceans – between February and March 2014. The course has since been revised and our new 4-week version is now live (launched on 10 October 2016). Continue reading →

Spread the word

Hello everyone and thank you for your interesting and inciteful discussions on this MOOC! This year many of the questions in Week 6 of the MOOC were concerned with the issue of marine litter, so this will be the focus of my final blog post. The first way that each of us can make a difference to the amount of litter that is ending up in our oceans, is to be responsible about what we are throwing away: check what items can go in your recycling bin. Continue reading →

Microplastics and the smart phone revolution

As a final blog post for the MOOC I would like to share my advice for how you can help protect the oceans. The first issue I want to discuss is microplastics. These have been in the news a lot recently, but they are essentially tiny plastic particles which are found in personal hygiene products, such as face washes, toothpaste & body scrubs. The particles are used to exfoliate the dead cells. Continue reading →