Category: Videos

Video (TED): Paul Snelgrove on the Census of Marine Life

The Census of Marine Life was a ten year global scientifc collaboration intending to find out what has lived, does live, and will live in our oceans. The results of the census were released in 2010, and I have come across two books – Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life and World Ocean Census – documenting some of the discoveries of the census. The Tagging of Pacific Predators (ToPP) program was one part of the census activities. Here, Paul Snelgrove, who was in charge of the team that assembled the findings of the census, shows images of some of the remarkable creatures that were discovered living in the ocean during the course of the census.

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On a small scale, the SeaKeys project is a similar initiative confined to South African waters, with a citizen science flavour. If you haven’t already, read about it and get involved!

Video (TED): Graham Hawkes on undersea flight

Graham Hawkes is a submarine designer and inventor, and was almost singlehandedly responsible for the boom in undersea exploration vehicles during the 1980s and 1990s. He collaborated with Sylvia Earle on many of the deep dives that were achieved in his submarines. If you’ve watched the James Cameron film Aliens of the Deep, you’ve seen some of Hawkes’s submarines in action. He also built and piloted the submarine in the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only.

His company is called DeepFlight, and in this TED talk he describes the kinds of vessels that he builds. They are mash ups of aircraft and submarines,

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Article (and video): Rose George on the secret world of shipping

I have been waiting for Rose George’s book, Ninety Percent of Everything, to be issued in Kindle format. In the mean time, I’ve had to content myself with The Box and The Docks, both concerned with aspects of world wide containerised shipping. I also found this TED video of a talk given by Rose George, covering material in her book.

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The first chapter of Ninety Percent of Everything appears on the Longreads Blog, and I enjoyed it immensely. The author sets the scene for a voyage on a Maersk container ship by outlining the history and current state of (containerised) shipping. I found it more substantial (which can partly be explained by their differing purposes) than Donovan Hohn’s account of a trip on a container ship.

George goes into some detail about Maersk, the Danish (yay!) shipping company that is largely invisible to us on a day to day basis, but has annual revenues comparable to those of Microsoft. South Africa makes an unfortunate cameo in the chapter as George refers to the lawlessness of the high seas (see The Outlaw Sea for more on that), illustrated by the utterly shameful case of Akhona Geveza on board a Safmarine ship.

Read the full article (chapter!) here.

Video (TED): Enric Sala on pristine ocean ecosystems

Have you seen what Kingman Reef looks like? If not, today’s your lucky day. Kingman Reef is a triangular reef in the middle of nowhere (the northern Pacific Ocean). It is considered to be one of the very few practically untouched marine environments that we have left. The proliferation of coral is remarkable, and apex predators (mostly sharks) make up 75-85% of the fish biomass there.

In this TED talk, ecologist Enric Sala shows what untouched marine environments look like (turns out the accepted idea of the “normal” number of sharks for a reef is a bit on the low side), and mounts a spirited defence for no take marine reserves.

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Look out for Sylvia Earle in the audience!