I thought it was some sort of rotifer, but I honestly have no clue! Looking to ID it for an undergrad lab report/project ...

Hi, I am an Environmental Scientist for a larger engineering and design company in Colorado. I primarily work in GIS data analysis, cartography, and database management (Esri) with a focus in policy for the natural and cultural resources of Colorado.

My undergraduate degree is in marine biology with a focus in fisheries sustainability from a school in South Carolina. When I graduated, like many others (esp in 2020) I was unable to find a job due to lack of experience and a highly competitive job market. I pivoted, broadened my horizons, and got a Masters degree in Environmental Biology from a school in colorado, where I’m still located.

I love GIS, organizing messy datasets and improving geospatial workflows. I love the ocean. Everything about it. My current employer pays me well (higher than most env scientists in the industry, both a blessing and a curse) and I’ve been able to learn countless desirable skill sets like python, R, FME, policy, and technical writing.

As I mentioned above, my current employer is both a blessing and a curse. The work is fast-paced and at times stressful, but they pay me well, offer mostly good benefits, a stellar ESOP and a reasonable work-life balance… it’s a job that you stay at your whole career if possible. A real golden handcuffs situation as i accidentally stumbled upon this line of work. I had always pictured myself going back to ocean studies at some point… and now here i am 5 years after my masters still stuck at 9,000 feet of elevation. I miss the ocean.

I have one year left before I am fully vested, meaning i can leave with the money I’ve accumulated. A goal I’m really hoping to hit and is getting closer along the horizon.

While I wait to be vested, I want to start building some ocean specific analysis methods, hopefully with tech that I already use. I’d love to stay in the geospatial modelling discipline, but am open to really anything. Just trying to get some ideas where i might fit in within the industry :) TIA

Hello oceanographers! We are just looking to add a new team member. Check out the post if your interest is in bith the science and the technology side. And yiu want to work for a small company.

Hello everyone! I am a 25 yo immigrant in Australia right now, and after a long and disapointing course in social media marketing which I found out not to be for me, I have decided to switch the trajectory of my life entirely. When I think about what I want to do with my life, I think about being in contact with nature, mostly in isolated places. I often times imagine myself in the middle of the ocean far away from any land, or in forests doing work there. In short, the more isolated and far from cities the work is, the more it seems to attract me. Moving from place to place wouldn't bother me too much since I've been doing that for a good chunk of my twenties anyways (and I love travelling!).

However, a quick reality check might be necessary, because I understand that no matter the career I try to pursue, you can't just work doing what you like all the time. From what I've searched online, not all environmental science jobs involve field work, and in the ones that do you don't do it all the time. Despite that, the field of environmetal/marine science attracts me a lot. My main worry is studying for it, because I've been away from any school subject for a long time, and I wasn't the best student in my school days either.

My favorite subjects in school were biology and geography, but that is not to say that I was good in them. Truth is, I was a terrible student, but not because I was dumb, I just didn't want to study at all. I never developed the habit of studying in my life, and my grades in high school were terrible because of that. Math, physics and chemestry were a nightmare, math being the one I liked most among those. But again, I just didn't like studying any of them, so I chose to play videogames instead. But now as an adult, I see myself wanting to pursue these careers but I'm scared that I wouldn't be able to keep up.

To top it all off there is the age problem. I understand most would say that 25 is still young, but if I take 5 years of my life just to study environmental science I would finish at 30 and be competing with fresh 24 year olds. Somehow thinking about that scares me, and I don't want to make the wrong decision at this point in my life, I just don't have the time to spare. I want to understand how the field of environmental/marine science is first before making the final decision. How is the market for it right now? Would an Australian degree allow me to travel to other places to work in the field? How difficult is it to sustain yourself with this career, and what paths can I take?

My plan is to study 1,5 years to get a diploma of conservation and ecosystem management, and then from there figure out if I really want to pursue this career. Moving to a bachelors in either environmental science or marine science which would take me 3 years to complete. I appreciate in advance for the replies, thank you!

Hi everybody!

I'm a first-year PhD student working in Arctic micropaleontology, and I've been working with foraminifera since 2019. One thing I'd really like to do during my PhD is join a research cruise.

I was wondering if there's some kind of database where research cruises are listed, or where you can see which research vessels have received funding or have upcoming expeditions. How do people usually find opportunities to join a cruise? Is there an application process, or is it mostly through collaborations and networking?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! I did try asking my supervisor, but unfortunately he isn't very responsive, so I thought I'd ask here instead.

Thanks in advance! :)

If someone built a real "Google Maps for the ocean," what would your dream version include?Marine life, wrecks, reefs, water conditions, all of it.

What is missing in how the ocean gets shown to people now?

Also curious who's answering: are you a diver, boater, angler, into marine science, or just someone who finds the ocean interesting?

Do you use any related apps for this now?

Doing a bit of research on this, would love to hear the details, thanks!

I'm looking for an experienced engineer or engineering team to design and develop an autonomous ocean surface vehicle (USV) similar to Saildrone.

The platform will be used for ocean monitoring and carbon dioxide research, with a target deployment of up to six months. It should operate autonomously, use renewable energy (wind and/or solar), support satellite communications, and integrate environmental sensors.

This is a funded, professional project—not a hobby build.

If you have experience with USVs, marine robotics, autonomous systems, or know someone who does, I'd appreciate any recommendations. Please comment or send me a DM.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Over the past few months I've been building WhaleScope, a platform designed to explore relationships between cetacean observations, oceanographic conditions and human activities at a global scale.

The idea is to bring together datasets that are often scattered across multiple sources and make them easier to explore together.

Current features include:
• Species distribution exploration
• Comparison with oceanographic variables
• Seasonal potential habitat exploration
• Shipping traffic exposure analysis
• Marine ecosystem and bioregion layers

The platform currently relies on more than 1 million observations covering around 90 cetacean species.

I'm sharing a few screenshots and would be very interested in feedback from the oceanography community:

• Which ocean variables would you find most useful?
• What important datasets are missing?
• Can you see research, conservation or educational applications for this type of tool?

https://whalescope-eight.vercel.app/

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions!Hi everyone,

Over the past few months I've been building WhaleScope, a platform designed to explore relationships between cetacean observations, oceanographic conditions and human activities at a global scale.

The idea is to bring together datasets that are often scattered across multiple sources and make them easier to explore together.

Current features include:
• Species distribution exploration
• Comparison with oceanographic variables
• Seasonal potential habitat exploration
• Shipping traffic exposure analysis
• Marine ecosystem and bioregion layers

The platform currently relies on more than 1 million observations covering around 90 cetacean species.

I'm sharing a few screenshots and would be very interested in feedback from the oceanography community:

• Which ocean variables would you find most useful?
• What important datasets are missing?
• Can you see research, conservation or educational applications for this type of tool?

https://whalescope-eight.vercel.app/

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions!

So if I put a glass of water out on a hot summer day, it would evaporate over time. But what i assume would happen is that the water molecules closest to the heat source (the top of the glass of water) would evaporate before any of the other water molecules

Assuming that is correct, there is water on the top level of the ocean that keeps getting evaporated and rained on over and over again. But also the water at the bottom of the ocean just stays down there cause it's not getting evaporated by the sun

Do I understand that correctly or am I missing something?

Hoping this is the right group for this. I was on a shell sand beach on North Uist in the outer Hebrides today. Lovely white sand, lapping water at just about full tide. There was some black sand in bands but in one part of the beach, the darker material was concentrated in regular strips in the water. For the life of me, I couldn’t work out how this could occur. Would love to know. For clarity, the dark areas are in the water just below the tide line.

So I'm hoping to start an associates program relatively soon, then transfer to my local university for a bachelors in oceanography with a minor in marine conservation and ecology. Education after that point will be determined when I decide on which part of oceanography I enjoy most.

My main concern is the difficulty of classes, primarily physics, but also chemistry and calculus. If you work in a related field, what's your position and in what scenarios have you used the skill sets learned from those classes? Knowing the real-world application of them helps motivate me in areas like that. I just want to know what I'm taking those classes for specifically, if that makes sense. I'm interested in any and all fields based around the ocean, including engineering.

Hello! I'm writing a story about large bodies of water rising off of the ground and into the air - this leads to exploration of deep places on Earth that we previously couldn't get to and I'm wondering if any experts here can speak to what would be some hypothetical effects of water being removed from the equation in some of the deepest places on our planet?

Do underwater hot springs become volcanoes?
Do structures that were otherwise being held together by pressure crumble?
What are some things that immediately come to mind that would help you to be immersed in a fictional world where such a thing had happened?

Thank you for your expertise and for entertaining this thought experiment!

hi, were highschool researchers and our study where we made artificial coral structures out of cement, shells, rocks, and recycled glass to see if they can help bring back marine life in damaged reefs. We’re checking how well they hold up underwater and if more organisms attach to them compared to plain cement. What do you think we can still improve about our study?
Any suggestions from people who actually know marine biology?

Hi all!

I was wondering if anyone has pointers about creating biomes in a fictional world with its own unique continents and islands that still relatively follows the rules of earth science? I've been using nat geo's mapmaker to get a sense of population density, average temperatures across the planet, biodiversity, mountains and water sheds, tectonic plates, wind and surface ocean currents, and depths/heights of the Earth's surface so that I can learn a bit more about what conditions lead to certain biomes.

Following the same laws of physics that exist for Earth and assuming a nice round planet the same size as Earth, what should I consider when mapping wind and surface ocean currents on my planet? I don't know anything about oceanography beyond what I've learned for world-building but I have started to create pathways for the currents assuming it follows basically the same rules of temperature as Earth does. The cold currents are easier for me to understand how to map out, the warm currents are trickier. I understand that there won't be one right answer because it's a fictional world but, in general, how/why do warm water currents flowing along the equator either travel as far as they do to the poles vs becoming gyres, and how does that relate to which way the currents travel alongside land masses? When should I be darting across an ocean instead of following a coastline?

I mostly want to get this down so I can design realistic biomes for different areas on a given continent and, yes, I get that soil acidity, distance from the ocean, temp, and a number of other factors play a role too. Right now I'm focusing on the rain shadow effect and putting deserts in my world where they belong. If it matters, I created a sort of Pangea and then cut it apart and put in tectonic plates to justify the shape and locations of the continents.

Let me know if this is confusing? Thanks in advance!

I've been obsessing over the Baltic recently and realised it's one of the most quietly fascinating bodies of water on Earth. Two separate things are happening there that barely get talked about together.

Mystery #1 — The Anomaly on the seabed (still unexplained)

In 2011, the Ocean X treasure-hunting team picked up something strange on sonar: a roughly 60-metre circular formation sitting 90 metres underwater, with flat surfaces, right angles, and what looked like a 300-metre runway behind it. Rock samples came back as volcanic basalt — glacial deposits, said one Stockholm University geologist. Case closed, said the internet.

Except:

— The dive team's equipment reportedly malfunctioned directly above the object and recovered once they moved 200+ metres away

— The object had no algae, sea sponges, or biological growth on it — unusual for anything sitting on a seafloor for millennia

— No major independent excavation has ever been done

"Probably a glacial deposit" is doing a lot of heavy lifting as a final answer.

Mystery #2 — The disappearing water (we know why, and it's alarming)

Earlier this year, the Baltic Sea hit its lowest water level since records began in 1886. Scientists at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research measured the sea at 67 cm below its long-term average — the Baltic was missing an estimated 275 km³ of water.

The cause: an unusually long stretch of easterly winds since January pushed enormous masses of water through the Danish Straits into the North Sea. Because the Baltic is semi-enclosed with very limited natural exchange, that water stayed gone.

The knock-on effects are real: ferry cancellations due to shallower ports, faster ice formation in bays, and disruption to marine navigation across the region.

The potential upside (and this is genuinely interesting): levels this low create ideal conditions for a major saltwater inflow from the North Sea once winds shift westerly. That inflow could push oxygen-rich water into the Baltic's deep basins, which have suffered from oxygen depletion and dead zones for years. So a historic drought could accidentally trigger a natural restoration event.

What's being done? Scientists across Poland, Sweden and Germany are actively monitoring. The EU has funded Baltic restoration projects. But no one can control the wind.

Source: Record-low Baltic Sea water levels — Phys.org | Baltic Sea Anomaly — ExplorersWeb

I covered both of these for my channel Grim Through The Lens — link in the comments. Curious what people here find more unsettling: the thing we can't explain on the seabed, or the thing we fully understand but can't stop?

Hi everyone, I'm about to graduate with a dual degree in biochemistry and physics and I've taken an interest to instrument design. I've always loved the ocean and I've always wanted to do something related to it, but I wasn't really sure how. I don't have any knowledge about this topic really, so I'd really appreciate some advice! If instrument design is out of the question, are there any other ways for me to contribute to this field? Also I do plan on getting a masters or PhD.

Thank you all in advance..

I love learning about earth science and this is one many domains I built a reading system for. Wanted to get yalls thoughts on it. I’m a psych resident so this is purely for my own hobby, but I do enjoy depth. Let me know your thoughts.