As many mariners and naturalists do, SEA Semester students make sketches and keep journals. For members of the Colonization to Conservation in the Caribbean program, illustration and journaling are part of the curriculum.  Leading the instruction this past winter with Class C-284 was Victoria Smith, SEA’s alumni coordinator, and an accomplished artist in her own right.

Greetings from the marine department, where we’re constantly thinking about our ships. As I write this, spring is in the air and we’re gearing up for the arrival in Woods Hole of the SSV Corwith Cramer.

An in-depth conversation with SEA Professor of Oceanography Jeff Schell on teaching at SEA, the health of coral reefs, and the mysteries of the Sargasso Sea

Professor of Oceanography Jeff Schell is the former director for SEA’s Colonization to Conservation in the Caribbean program and led the creation of SEA’s Reef Expedition programs.  A graduate of College of the Holy Cross (BA), SUNY Stony Brook (MS) and University of Wisconsin at Madison (PhD), his areas of interest include the ecology of marine and freshwater habitats with a focus on distribution, diversity, and species composition of plankton communities, the ecology of pelagic Sargassum and its associated community, marine environmental history, interdisciplinary approaches to teaching, science illustration and storytelling.

All is well aboard the Robert C. Seamans.

How often do you think about the ocean? As inhabitants of a coastal commonwealth and a historic maritime city, we do so perhaps more than the average American. The more compelling question is “how do we think about the ocean?” How would we describe it? Beautiful and mysterious? Likely. Awe-inspiring? Perhaps. How about imperiled? Damaged? Hopeless?

Thursday, June 8 marks the 26th annual World Oceans Day, an idea that emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The World Oceans Day website describes the annual event as providing “a unique opportunity to honor, help protect, and conserve the world’s oceans.” It notes that our oceans provide much of the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, and help to maintain the climate that sustains us. Our oceans also inspire us. For one day in June, we are encouraged to acknowledge and celebrate these gifts, and to commit ourselves to improving ocean health through both activism and our choices as consumers.

How do you feel about rainy days? I have a hunch that most of you are like me, and far prefer prefer blue skies to drizzle and rain. Yet it is a pretty indulgent relationship with water, something we can afford thanks to municipal water supplies and secure access to it. Something that can quickly make this fact plain to us is a trip to an atoll island pretty much anywhere. I remember waking up to the sound hard rain hammering the tin roof of my friend Herve’s house on the island of Rangiroa in French Polynesia some years ago.