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.
Every time you take a breath, you’re drinking in life-giving oxygen. When our planet was born, though, the atmosphere contained almost no oxygen at all. Oxygen was first pumped into the atmosphere billions of years ago – by microscopic organisms in the oceans.
They come from above in never-ending waves. They ensnare you, lop off your limbs, chop you apart, then toss your body aside. There is no escape. Unless they decide to stop, your entire species is doomed.
The Arctic is the pineapple upside-down cake of the oceans: To see the same temperature structure as in the other oceans, you’d have to flip it upside down.
At the start of the 20th century, a small village on the Texas coast didn’t have to brag about its good sport fishing. All people needed to hear was its name: Tarpon, after a feisty gamefish that could fight for hours.
It’s tough to escape from Alcatraz. During its three decades as a prison, only five men got away without recapture, and it’s likely that some or all of them drowned in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay.
1913 was a big year for the Norwegian fishing industry — the fleet brought in a record haul of adult herring. Marine biologists discovered something odd, though: Most of those fish had hatched in a single year. The discovery helped change the way that scientists look at fish populations and the focus of their research on fisheries.
You might expect the deepest spots in the oceans to be far away from land, but that isn’t the case. Most of them are within a couple of hundred miles of land — an island chain or the edge of a continent. In fact, they’re carved by the same process that creates land.
The sea cucumber is one of the most common creatures in the world’s oceans — it’s found everywhere from tide pools to the deep ocean. It also has one of the most disgusting habits of any ocean creature — it shoots stuff out of its rear end to discourage hungry predators.
Time capsules aren’t limited to building cornerstones and the pedestals of statues. Geologists, for example, found one about two-thirds of a mile beneath Chesapeake Bay. Its treasure is the water of the ancient North Atlantic — water that’s been cut off from the ocean for more than a hundred million years.
When it comes to getting along, we could all take a lesson from the Portuguese man-of-war. Despite its fearsome sting, it’s really a “let’s-all-get-along” kind of creature. That’s because it’s really a cooperative — a collection of several different organisms that come together to make a single critter.
