Oceans in Extra Depth! FractalMom, Marine Life, the 1000 Year Conveyor Belt, & More!

Learners will explore the oceans from top to bottom and all around the globe with a research oceanographer.  I will tell stories, answer questions,  give demonstrations, show images and play sounds while we explore the scientific data that we need to understand each topic.  Students will get to use their critical thinking skills as they look at some of the data themselves, and decide what it means as citizen scientists.  We will use the framework of scaling, a rapid way of approaching math problems  used by scientists all the time. 

Each class is stand-alone, and learners do not need to have any particular background knowledge to take this course. Repeat visitors will get to learn about a variety of different topics, and begin to build an understanding of how everything fits together.   Interested students are invited to do the experiments as I demonstrate,  learners can do it at home after the class, and delve into more details when we rotate back to topics already covered.  

Topics will change, and there will be new things each week!  Some examples of topics we will cover: biodiversity of marine life; Global Conveyor Belt (thermo-haline circulation); Ocean Carbon Pump (biological drivers of the carbon cycle); Red Tides (phytoplankton blooms); Ocean color satellites (remote sensing of the oceans); Sounds of marine mammals and birds (passive acoustic monitoring);  Layers in the ocean (vertical stratification and mixing); Nets and bottles vs echo sounders and AUVs (oceanographic instruments); Beaches and coastlines (consequences of sea level changes);  Sustainable fisheries (marine resource management); Ocean catastrophes (internal waves, brinicles, tsunamis, underwater avalanches); Pollution Problems (human impacts on the ocean); Ocean Careers (how to be a biological oceanographer? marine biologist? fisheries manager? environmental scientist? ship captain? ); How big is the ocean? (scaling all the water in the earth system, from the global budget to the drinkable water).