Posted inOcean Facts & Science
What Causes Ocean Currents to Reverse Seasonally
Stand on a beach in Mumbai in July and the water pulls one way. Stand there again in December and it pulls the other. This is not a trick of…
Posted inOcean Facts & Science
How Icebergs Form and Why Most of Them Stay Hidden
A ship's radar operator once told me that the scariest icebergs are never the ones you can see. That single line has stuck with me through years of writing about…
Posted inOcean Facts & Science
Why Some Seas Have No Tides At All
Stand on a beach in Split, Croatia, at sunrise, then come back at sunset. The water will look almost exactly the same. Now do the same thing on the coast…
Posted inOcean Facts & Science
The Water Cycle and the Ocean: How They’re Actually Connected
Close your eyes and picture the water cycle. Chances are you're seeing a simple diagram: a cloud, an arrow, some rain, a river winding back to the sea. It's the…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
Eugenie Clark: The Shark Lady Who Changed Marine Biology
Most people who fear sharks have never met one. Eugenie Clark met thousands of them. As a result, she came away convinced they were among the most misunderstood animals on…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
Don Walsh Trieste: The First Man to Reach the Challenger Deep
Seven miles down, in total darkness, a window cracked. That was the moment Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard could have turned back. Instead, they kept going. A few hours later,…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
James Cameron’s Deepsea Challenger Dive Explained
On March 26, 2012, a filmmaker climbed into a steel sphere. It was barely wider than a bathtub. He rode it down to the bottom of the ocean, alone. That…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
Marie Tharp Mapping: The Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor
Picture a scientist who never once set foot on a research ship. Yet she ended up redrawing the entire floor of the world's oceans by hand. That is not a…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
Auguste Piccard: The Engineer Behind the First Deep Dives
Long before satellites mapped the seafloor, one Swiss physicist made a bold leap. He had flown a balloon into the stratosphere. So he decided he could just as easily sink…
Posted inOcean Exploration & History
Robert Ballard Discoveries: The Man Who Found the Titanic
For seventy three years, the Titanic sat somewhere on the floor of the North Atlantic, and nobody knew exactly where. Then, in the early hours of September 1, 1985, a…