Oceans

The Meg

This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Shark Week

The Meg Jaws doesn’t own a monopoly on horror films with giant sharks. 1999’s Deep Blue Sea features a glorious death scene, where Samuel L. Jackson proselytizes in a way only he can, before being devoured by genetically modified makos. In 2013, SyFy introduced the world to the Sharknado universe, in which sharks emerge from tornados inside hurricanes. Most shark […]

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Shark Week

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Shark Week

Shark Week In July 1988, Discovery Channel launched a programming block based on sharks. The first iteration of the theme began with a piece called Caged in Fear, about abalone divers who developed a contraption to keep them safe during their harvests. Now in its 36th season, Shark Week is the longest-running cable television event in history. The

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The Beach Primeval

The Beach Primeval Members of my family have spent holidays at the New Jersey shore for at least 70 years, likely longer. My mother and her siblings traveled with their elders to the boroughs of Seaside Heights and Seaside Park, which sit on a strip that locals call “the barrier island.” The Barnegat Peninsula, also

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The Hole Story

The Hole Story Seventy-one percent of the Earth’s surface is covered with oceans. Eighty percent of those tempestuous seas is completely unexplored. We like to think of outer space as the final frontier, but that’s a large swath of our home about which we know very little. And with all those murky regions, unmapped and

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Bloop

Bloop In the late 1940s, the U.S. Navy began to develop the Sound Surveillance System, an array of passive sonar stations designed to track Soviet submarines. By the late 1980s, SOSUS became surplus goods, as the USSR blinked out of existence. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to utilize the system to study the

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The Bathysphere

The Bathysphere In our previous exploration on the death spirals of army ants, we met the enigmatic William Beebe, ornithologist, entomologist, ichthyologist, and conservationist. Beebe pioneered a holistic approach to ecology. In order to understand a place in totality, one must study the place in totality. Having practiced this method multiple times in the jungle,

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Point Nemo

Point Nemo Way back in Episode #32, we explored Poles of Inaccessibility. These geographic curiosities are the spots on continents or countries that are the farthest from some criterion, usually the ocean. In North America, the point farthest from any major sea lies in South Dakota, 1,030 miles from salty water. We can also measure the

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Eqalussuaq

Eqalussuaq If you watched Jeopardy! last week you may recall one particular clue that stood out to the nature-lovers among us: “A very old vertebrate the Greenland shark takes nearly 150 years to reach this; for humans it’s around age 10 or 11” The Greenland shark – image by NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program The correct response: What

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