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.
Contrary to popular belief, you can’t see the Great Wall of China from the Moon. In fact, it’s hard to see even from Earth orbit.
But another “great” structure is easy to see from space. It was built not by human hands, but by nature. It’s the Great Barrier Reef -- the largest living structure on the planet. It stretches more than a thousand miles along the coast of Australia, and covers an area as big as New Mexico.
It’s a jungle out there. Life in the oceans is a constant struggle for survival, with bigger critters eating the smaller ones. It’s not just a struggle of the sharks and fish and crabs, though. It’s a struggle that plays out in every cubic inch of seawater -- enough to make one good mouthful.
The Pacific is the king of the oceans. It’s wider and deeper than the other oceans, and it covers as much area as the Atlantic and Indian oceans combined.
But the Atlantic is gaining on it: It’s growing wider as the Pacific gets narrower. It’s all part of the process that created the ocean basins in the first place.
The basins are the deepest part of the oceans -- a mile and a quarter deep or more. They’re constantly changing as the result of processes below Earth’s surface.
The Amazon River nurtures a bounty of life -- the creatures that inhabit its waters, and the world’s largest rain forest around it. It also nurtures life when it empties into the Atlantic Ocean -- a bounty of microscopic plants that may play a role in regulating Earth’s climate.
The plants are known as phytoplankton, and they’re found in the top layers of all the world’s oceans. In recent years, scientists have been studying the role they play in regulating Earth’s climate.
When European explorer John Cabot neared the coast of Newfoundland in 1497, he saw so many fish churning the waters that you could practically walk on them. And for the next five centuries, European and American fleets scooped up those fish by the shipful: herring, halibut, haddock, and others, but mostly Atlantic cod.
They found this bounty in the Grand Banks, one of the most storied regions of the Atlantic Ocean.
The law of the jungle applies to the oceans just as much as the land: It’s eat or get eaten. And the difference often depends on one factor: speed. The creatures that are fast enough catch another meal -- or keep themselves from getting caught.
The oceans are full of speedy fish. The blue shark can zip along at a good 25 miles an hour, and perhaps faster. A tuna can clock in at around 30 miles an hour, while the dolphinfish might top out at 50.
The deepest spot in the Atlantic isn’t way out in the middle of the ocean, as you might expect it to be. Instead, it’s close to the edge -- a narrow canyon north of Puerto Rico known as the Puerto Rico Trench. A long segment of it bottoms out at a depth of more than five miles.
Trenches like these are quite common in the Pacific. In fact, the deepest point in all the oceans is the Mariana Trench, near Japan, with a depth of more than seven miles. But there are only two trenches in all the Atlantic.
Just about everything in the oceans is hunter, hunted, or both. But in the early 20th century, a hunter in the Atlantic turned a fish in the Pacific into one of the most hunted on the planet.
The hunter was the German U-boat. The fishing industry on the East Coast shut down as boats stayed in port to avoid the submarines. So a hungry nation looked to the Pacific Ocean. And there, the fleets brought in a staggering bounty of Pacific sardines.
NEWSREEL: A brilliance of 500 Suns lights hundreds of miles of the Pacific, and the force of a million tons of TNT is released. 15 seconds later, the light is still unbearable.
The nuclear bomb known as Bravo was the most powerful ever exploded by the United States. On March 1st, 1954, the 15-megaton weapon vaporized three islands in the western Pacific. They were part of Bikini atoll -- a ring of islands enclosing a lagoon that’s as big as Chicago. The blast gouged a crater more than a mile wide and 250 feet deep.
Anemones are some of the most beautiful creatures in the sea. Masses of tentacles atop their bodies look like flower petals, waving gently in the currents. And they group together in colonies, spreading color across the ocean floor.
But the tranquil view can be misleading. Colonies can include “warriors” whose job is to keep other colonies from encroaching on their turf. As a result, colonies are separated by narrow strips of open ground -- underwater demilitarized zones.
