Radio Program
Our regular Science and the SeaTM radio program presents marine science topics in an engaging two-minute story format. Our script writers gather ideas for the radio program from the University of Texas Marine Science Institute's researchers and from our very popular college class, Introduction to Oceanography, which we teach to hundreds of non-science majors at The University of Texas at Austin every year. Our radio programs are distributed at to commercial and public radio stations across the country.
65 million years ago, a mountain-sized space rock slammed into Earth. The impact created worldwide fires and acid rain. It blasted so much debris into the atmosphere that it blacked out the Sun for months, and kept the planet unusually cold for years. Most of the life on land quickly vanished, including the dinosaurs. And without sunlight, tiny marine organisms known as phytoplankton vanished, too, triggering the collapse of the entire marine food chain.
When the Sun makes itself scarce and temperatures begin to plummet, bears and many other animals settle in for a long winter’s nap. They slow their metabolism and live off the fat they stored up during the summer, hibernating for up to several months.
Some of the tiniest creatures in the sea can hibernate, too. But like Rip Van Winkle, their naps can last for decades. And their awakening can be important not just for their own species, but for life on the entire planet.
The Southern Ocean is punctuated by an amazing variety of sounds — chirps and clicks and notes that sound like they were created for a sci-fi movie. Yet they’re produced by seals and whales, by grinding icebergs and cracking ice sheets, and by things that scientists are still trying to identify.
When a loggerhead turtle crawls off the Florida beach for the first time, it’s only a few inches long, and momma doesn’t stick around to guide it out to sea. Yet after a decade or more looping around the Atlantic Ocean, all the way to Africa or Europe and back, the turtle returns to the same nesting area where it hatched.
It’s been a rough few decades for Chesapeake Bay. Urban development and agriculture have taken away wetlands and polluted the waters. Invasive species have damaged the wetlands even more, and overcome some of the native species. And things may not get much better in the decades ahead, thanks to the rapid rise in sea level.
Not only is the water itself rising, but the land around the Chesapeake is sinking. The combined relative rise in sea level is up to two-tenths of an inch per year, and it’s expected to increase in the decades ahead.
Over the next few decades, some of the country’s most expensive property is likely to either get a lot more expensive, or to disappear beneath the waves — a victim of rising sea level.
Sea level is rising as a result of Earth’s warming climate. Higher temperatures melt the glaciers in Greenland, the Antarctic, and elsewhere, adding more water to the oceans. And as the oceans get warmer, the water expands, boosting sea level even more. Sea level increased by about six to eight inches during the 20th Century, with rises of several feet predicted for this century.
Individually, nutria are pretty inoffensive little creatures. They look like scruffy beavers with skinny tails, and they can even be domesticated.
But get a bunch of them together and it’s another story. Nutria can destroy marshes and wetlands, stripping acre after acre of grasses that protect the coastline from erosion and provide habitat for shellfish, birds, and other creatures. In fact, they’ve been doing that in the United States for three-quarters of a century.
Build it and they will come — fish, that is. Sink just about any big structure in the ocean and fish, crustaceans, and other marine life will flock to it. That rule seems to apply to wind-power turbines as well. Several studies in Europe show that reef systems develop on the bases of submerged turbines in a hurry.
The United States hasn’t built any offshore wind farms yet, although several are in the early stages of development. A government study said that offshore wind farms could provide as much electricity as all our current energy sources combined.
Penguins are some of the most adorable creatures on Earth. But some penguins that lived in New Zealand more than 25 million years ago also would have been a little bit scary — they were big enough to almost see eye-to-eye with a person.
People ranch just about anything these days, from llamas to emus. And the roundups aren’t limited to the land — some of them take place in the sea. One example is the sea urchin — a small, spiny creature found in much of the world. But natural stocks have been dwindling, so urchin are being raised in captivity — in tanks, cages, and undersea ranches.
The sea urchin is especially popular in Japan, where the roe — its reproductive organs — are a delicacy. In fact, Japan imports most of the world’s production of sea urchin.
