Concept
A Guide to Carbon Offsets: a dose of hope and skepticism
Written by: Alia Hidayat The science is clear. Climate change is happening, and it is critical that we act soon to prevent its worst effects. What’s less clear, however, is what we do about it. If you, like me, are easily overwhelmed by the news and are tied to long carbon-heavy plane or car…
Read MoreBlack History Month Blog Series 2020: Highlighting Achievements of Black Oceanographers
Written by: Alia Hidayat and Eeshan Bhatt Black scientists and students are underrepresented in higher education, especially in oceanography. Despite making up 12.7% of the US population1, just 6% of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in 2017 and just 7% of doctorate recipients from 1998 and 2018 were Black.2,3 This disparity is particularly…
Read MoreEnvironmental pollution and the precautionary principle
Written by: Anna Walsh A sign posted near Choccolocco creek, which received much of the wastewater discharge from the Monsanto PCB plant. Source: the Anniston Star. The town of Anniston, Alabama is dying. Entire neighborhoods have been abandoned, large swathes of land where nothing grows abound, and residents of all ages bear an…
Read MoreWhere’s the beef? Environmental implications of your next dinner
Written by: Justin Suca Many would agree that a steak dinner is unequivocally delicious. Unfortunately, the process of making that steak and getting it to your dinner plate is also unequivocally detrimental to the planet as we know it. Despite contributing a massive amount of greenhouse gases, emissions from agriculture have lacked the media attention…
Read MoreWhen Water Won’t Work
Written by: Noah Germolus Over the centuries, we have focused a great deal of brainpower on conquering the messes that water alone cannot wash away. This obsession with spotless surfaces produced some of the most pervasive classes of synthetic chemicals: soaps and solvents. Heavy grease on machinery, oil spills, drug manufacturing, and paint removal…
Read MoreFlotsam and Jetsam: a PhD student’s love of the ocean
Written by: Danielle Haas Freeman For more of Danielle’s writing, be sure to visit her writing website at https://www2.whoi.edu/staff/dfreeman/ By the time I was thirteen, my grandfather could no longer speak. He laughed sometimes, he gestured to things, he sometimes made noises of displeasure. But he was no longer capable of holding a conversation.…
Read MoreChildren, your greatest [carbon] legacy
Written by: EeShan Bhatt “Minus one” I look towards my partner and direct her attention to some news coverage on the recent IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. It details that the world has already warmed one degree Celsius relative to temperatures before the Industrial Revolution, and significant action is needed in the next…
Read MoreThe erstwhile king of Siluria
A planet shrinking over a few thousand years, wrinkling like an apple. Vast underground caverns filled with seawater that rises to the surface to form oceans. Volcanic eruptions powered by coal beds. All of those sound like ridiculous ideas in this day and age, but just a few hundred years ago, they represented some of…
Read MoreA brief history of the Wide Receiver Functions
Back in 2015, when my cousin set up a fantasy football league for my extended family, I named my first (and only) fantasy football team the “Wide Receiver Functions.” At the time I thought this was rather funny, but I was the only seismologist in the league, so instead of laughter I got confusion. Wide…
Read MoreSketchnoting, or how to tame your thoughts
Shortly after ringing in the New Year, I headed to San Francisco for the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), where scientists gathered to share their most newly acquired knowledge about the behavior, genetics, locomotion, evolution, metabolism, and many other aspects of just about every branch of the tree of…
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