Oceans – Science Sushi

Time to show our love for the oceans! Image from WorldOceansDay.org

Today is World Oceans Day, a United Nations-recognized day of ocean celebration and action. This year’s theme is simple—Healthy oceans, healthy planet—with a focus on the problem of marine plastic, a topic I recently wrote about for Popular Science.

Around the internets, World Oceans Day has been making a lot of waves, with lots of great articles about the importance of marine environments and what all of us can do to make them healthier. It’s heartening to see the attention that this day is receiving, including the flood of posts using the hashtag on Twitter*.

Here are some of my favorites ocean posts from today: Continue reading “Happy #WorldOceansDay! (A Link Round-Up)”

Recently, BuzzFeed came out with what sounded like a really interesting article: 16 Things No One Knows About The Ocean. I’ve been a fan of BuzzFeed lists before, and some are humorously accurate. But when I clicked through to read the list, I was disappointed. This wasn’t their usual hilarious-because-you-know-it’s-true-even-if-you-don’t-want-to-admit-it style post, or even an awe-inspiring-fact roundup. It was mostly, well, wrong.

The post begins: “Welcome to the last frontier on Earth. Sure, the oceans are terrifying and the Kraken might have been real, but the things we don’t know could fill a thousand documentaries on the Discovery Channel.” Perhaps the allusion to Discovery is all the more fitting given their recent penchant for faux marine science, but that’s no excuse for this shoddy list riddled with factual errors and pseudoscience. I know BuzzFeed community content is produced by a suite of random people, but come on—they need to have some kind of quality control! As a marine scientist, I just couldn’t let it slide.

So here is a point-by-point explanation of what BuzzFeed doesn’t apparently know about the oceans:
Continue reading “16 Things BuzzFeed Doesn’t Know About The Ocean”