Course: Exploring Our Ocean

For a summary of some of this week’s themes, watch this talk entitled “No longer in the dark: our choice for the future of the deep ocean” that Jon gave …

Just as we have been affecting the deep ocean environment (as you saw in the video ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind?’), so the deep ocean has a variety of …

Rubbish and litter strewn along beaches is unfortunately a common sight. The litter poll in the previous step is based on data from the Ocean Conservancy 2018 Cleanup Report. In …

Ocean scientists involved in the course give insights about what they miss and what they love about life at sea. What do you think you would miss the most? What …

Paul Tyler is a veteran of deep-sea dives in manned submersibles, with more than 20 years’ experience. In June 2013, Jon Copley became the first British person to dive beyond …

In this video, Rachel and Will give a more practical demonstration of residence time. As was explained in the video ‘Where does the salt come from?’, the concept of an …

So now that you have considered the vast quantities of salt that are present in the ocean, let’s get back to why that is. As you saw in previous videos, …

In the previous step Where does the salt come from? Will Homoky explained that rivers contain only a tiny fraction of salt compared to the waters of the ocean. Before …

In this step, Dr Will Homoky (University of Leeds) talks about the process of chemical weathering and the transport of water by rivers into the ocean. But rivers contain just …

Professor Rachel Mills explains why water is such a powerful solvent* and how this contributes to making our oceans salty. Over the next few steps we will explore the question …

In the previous video, Verity described how we preserve deep-sea specimens during research expeditions to analyse later ashore. If they turn out to belong to a previously unknown species, biologists …

In this step, Professor Mark Brandon demonstrates two key processes responsible for creating ocean gyres. Angular momentum The first process demonstrated in the video is something you may be familiar …

We learned in the previous week that the symbiosis of corals with photosynthetic microalgae is vital for the formation of warm water reefs in the shallows. Unfortunately, the relationship between …

As land-living animals, we are used to seeing habitats shaped and defined by fixed geographic features like hills, valleys, lakes and rivers. We also recognise changing seasons by looking at …

Most people can recognise the large ice dwelling polar bears and penguins, but many marine biologists are far more interested what lives under the ice and at the seafloor. Here, …