Author: Andrew David Thaler

Jacques Week 2018 Begins July 22! Join us for a week of classic Cousteau Documentaries!

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Jacques Week begins this Sunday, July 22, 2018! Join us for a week-long celebration of the ocean documentarian who started it all! Without Jacques there would be no Blue Planet, no Mission Blue, and no Shark Week. All next week we’re watching classic Jacques Cousteau Documentaries, discussing ocean science and conservation, and celebrating all things Ocean!

Most of these films will available online. Some will require purchase. We’ve provided links to the for-purchase options and offer alternates if you can’t find them. It’s become nearly impossible to find copies of the Jacques Cousteau Odyssey collection, so, though this series includes some of my all time favorites, we’re going to phase them out this year and instead lean more heavily on River Explorations for more recent Cousteau work. Links to all available films can be found at the JacquesWeek2017 YouTube playlist.

Jacques Week is a collective viewing experience. We’ll provide links to each piece of media, due a countdown on Twitter, and then everyone hits play at the same(ish) time and we watch these incredible documentaries together.  Read More

#JacquesWeek returns! Falling glaciers, fish that don’t eat plastic, sharks and the women who study them, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: July 16, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Fishermen with an illegal haul of totoaba. Image courtesy of Elephant Action League.

Photo: Toby Driver (RCAHMW)

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Valuing the deep sea, send @mcmsharksxx to Antarctica, deep-sea mining takes a dive, explore Kiribati, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: July 9, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)

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Voyaging canoes, failed sea-steading sea states, breaching ocean plastic, deep-sea mining, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: July 2, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Atlas Obscura is on a roll this week with some seriously fabulous ocean coverage, including my new favs:

The wreck of the Jalisco. ASSOCIATED PRESS

The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)

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A new disaster in Ocean Policy, follow the International Marine Conservation Congress at #IMCC5, shallow vents, deep mining, cotton candy lobsters, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 25, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)

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Shrinking Islands, shrieking dolphins, little hobbit shrimp, boat knives, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 18, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

A combination of storm-driven erosion and sea-level rise, which are both increasing as climate change advances, may soon swallow the island entirely.Photograph by Gordon Campbell / At Altitude Gallery

A normal call. 

The call of a dolphin that would rather not get eaten. 

The Levee (A featured project that emerged from Oceandotcomm)

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Things that go “POP!” in the deep: crushed cups, whole cans, and seafloor spam.

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

This week, two questions echoed through the hallowed halls of Deep-sea Science. It began, as things these days tend to begin, with a tweet. Dr. Diva Amon challenged deep-sea researchers to show off their shrunken cups from the bottom of the abyss. And we obliged, oh but did we oblige.

Concurrently, though unrelated, Angelo Villagomez announced out symposium on Human Impacts in the Deep Sea and shared several image of the garbage that finds its way to the ocean floor. Cans of cheap beer and pristine Spam littered the deepest reaches of the Mariana Trench, where they will lie forever as they are slowly buried in sediment.

And thus we found ourselves awash in to variations on the same theme: Why did that ocean thing get crushed? and Why didn’t that ocean thing get crushed? Read More

Cinnamon-flavored hagfish, how to open a coconut, hunted by sperm whales, speaking up for the blue, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 11, 2018.

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

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Hacking Extinction, fishing for hagfish, itchy crabs, clam cavalcades, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: June 4, 2018

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

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Summer Science Outreach Challenge: Write an OpEd.

Posted on by Andrew David Thaler

If you’ve been following along with our weekly round-up of ocean news, the Monday Morning Salvage (and, if not, why aren’t you reading the Monday Morning Salvage? It’s your one stop shop for the latest and greatest in ocean science and conservation news!) you probably noticed that we called for scientists and conservation professionals to write OpEds or Letters to the Editor this May. We heard from several folks that they submitted articles, though we haven’t heard back that any have been published yet (please leave a link in the comments if yours have). So, we’re extending the challenge and asking science and conservation professionals to take a stand for something you care about and submit a letter or article to your local paper.

Simone Giertz builds the best robots on the internet.

Why? A recent study with a large sample size, published this year, demonstrated that OpEds can play a significant in shaping people’s opinions about political and social issues. Though this CATO Institute funded study has a distinctively libertarian slant in the issues they chose to use as treatments, the results are reasonably compelling. Not only did OpEds influence how readers felt about an issue, but regardless of political group, exposure to an OpEd made the reader more likely to agree with the author’s position.

“We find limited evidence of treatment effect heterogeneity by party identification: Democrats, Republicans, and independents all appear to move in the predicted direction by similar magnitudes… Despite large differences in demographics and initial political beliefs, we find that op-eds were persuasive to both the mass public and elites, but marginally more persuasive among the mass public.”

source.

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