Join Dan Cayan as he describes his research on the impacts of climate variability and attempts to improve climate and extended weather forecasts in the California region. (59 minutes)

Scripps is home to the largest academic research fleet in the nation. Learn more about this incredibly valuable resource from Associate Director Dr. Robert Knox, head of Scripps marine operations and technical support. (58 minutes)

Join Lisa Tauxe as she describes her research into the long-term behavior of Earth's magnetic field. (42 minutes)

Join Dr. Lynne Talley as she describes how she and others are using decades of ocean observations from floats, research vessels, and merchant ships to discern the long-term signal of climate change that is recorded in our oceans. (49 minutes)

Join Scripps Institution's David Hilton as takes us on a journey to Costa Rica on the first stage of research to find out if volcanoes put out as much as the earth's mantle takes back during the processes of subduction and volcanism. (28 minutes)

Join Kendall Melville as he describes his work on Waves that occur both at the surface and in the ocean's interior and learn the profound influence their energy has on oceanographic and climatic processes. (49 minutes)

Join Scripps physical oceanographer Clint Winant as he describes this complex interface between the land and sea. Learn how he and his colleagues are providing insight into how human activities can impair this fragile ecosystem. (54 minutes)

Modern oceanography has been built on a legacy of centuries of seagoing dating back to ancient times. Join distinguished Scripps Emeritus Professor Joe Reid as he describes what the earliest sailors knew about the oceans and how technical achievements through the ages have allowed ocean explorers to venture to the far reaches of the globe. (51 minutes)

As the name suggests, microbeads are very small (microscopic) beads of plastic. Since they are particles of less than 1mm, they are almost impossible to capture as they enter household drains. This leaves these small, solid balls of plastic to enter our aquatic ecosystems where they are ingested by organisms and accumulated within the food web.  In this activity, students are challenged to design and construct their own device to extract microplastics from cosmetic products such as facial cleansers, body wash, and toothpaste.

Students examine the nature of the problem and work collaboratively to create solutions to the issue of nurdles becoming evermore present in our oceans. Nurdles are small plastic resin pellets which are used to make many of the plastics we use every day. Unfortunately, they end up where they are not supposed to and cause a wide range of problems.  Nurdle Know-How is a series of activities that will ultimately prepare students to design and build a nurdle capture system to clean up their local bay, harbor, or coastal waters.

In this investigation, students design and create a Recycling Sorting Machine to eliminate the amount of waste that is incorrectly being sent to landfill. Students use basic resources (recycled and/or reused items in the classroom, home, or their community) to engineer a solution to the growing problem of waste in our schools.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Every year, over 9 million metric tons of plastic waste enter the ocean and can harm its ecosystems. When it comes to marine microbes, most of the current research has focused on those that directly colonize the plastic particles. But plastic also leaches chemical additives into the water, which could impact planktonic microbes as well. So, researchers tested the impact of leachate from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a common plastic, and zinc, a plastic additive, on a natural planktonic community. Some microorganisms, including both bacteria and eukaryotes, were impaired by exposure to plastic leachates. Photosynthetic microorganisms, the base of the food web, were particularly strongly affected, showing declines in photosynthetic efficiency, diversity, and abundance. Other important and normally highly abundant bacterial groups were also negatively impacted. In contrast, microorganisms that thrive in nutrient-rich environments, copiotrophs, dramatically increased in relative abundance..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This article provides an overview of the geography, characteristics, and life of the Arctic and Southern Oceans.

This course introduces theoretical and practical principles of design of oceanographic sensor systems. Topics include: transducer characteristics for acoustic, current, temperature, pressure, electric, magnetic, gravity, salinity, velocity, heat flow, and optical devices; limitations on these devices imposed by ocean environments; signal conditioning and recording; noise, sensitivity, and sampling limitations; and standards. Lectures by experts cover the principles of state-of-the-art systems being used in physical oceanography, geophysics, submersibles, acoustics. For lab work, day cruises in local waters allow students to prepare, deploy and analyze observations from standard oceanographic instruments.

Third grade students will pick an ocean animal to learn about. This would work well with a themetic unit.

The ocean is a critical piece of the climate change puzzle. It's estimated that the ocean has absorbed about one third of the excess CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere and more than 90% of trapped heat in the atmosphere. So, today, we’re going underwater to talk about the ocean and climate change with renowned marine biologist Dr. Sylvia Earle.

This unit includes 10 lessons that culminate in a student created final product presentation on the factors that influence climate change through the lens of chemistry and oceanography using literacy strategies to conduct inquiry level research.

Using inquiry-based reading, student will examine an anchor text to formulate a question to guide their research and development of student driven projects. Throughout the unit, students will use a variety of texts, websites, and other resources to develop a product and presentation that exhibits their literacy and inquiry skills. Using inquiry-based reading, students will explore an anchor text and then develop their own essential and supporting questions to guide their research. Over the course of the unit, students will explore a variety of texts and grow in their knowledge of cellular organelles and in their ability to use informational text to support their inquiry and research.

In this lesson, students learn about major landforms (e.g., mountains, rivers, plains, valleys, canyons and plateaus) and how they occur on the Earth's surface. They learn about the civil and geotechnical engineering applications of geology and landforms, including the design of transportation systems, mining, mapping and measuring natural hazards.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Microbial mats are windows to our past of the earliest ecosystems to evolve on earth, especially those found in Shark Bay, Australia. Here, these lush mats are shedding light into the lives of microbes that are yet to be cultured in the lab, an untapped resource of biological information known as “microbial dark matter”. In a new study, researchers reconstructed 115 genomes belonging to members of this microbial dark matter. The researchers detected entirely new microorganisms that may participate in sulfate reduction, microbes capable of fermenting and degrading organic carbon, and microbes with a high capacity for producing hydrogen. Overall, the results suggest that microbial dark matter could play critical roles in nutrient cycling across the planet. Further genomics studies could place novel microorganisms found in microbial mats into their proper ecological and environmental context and offer clues on how to cultivate these microbes in the lab for closer examination..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Some of the most unusual and versatile of all the mammals are the groups that live, feed and reproduce underwater. In this unit we will see how these formerly land-based mammals adapted to a return to the water, discussing such challenges as breathing, mo