Professor Blue

Serious about science since….first grade

Learn aboard, don’t be bored — summer camp for kids

Hey Kids!

Learn about marine biol­ogy, coastal ecol­ogy, oceanog­ra­phy, con­ser­va­tion and more at BOAT CAMP in New­bury­port Mass­a­chu­setts this sum­mer, 2011.

BOAT CAMP’s week long pro­gram aboard the Erica Lee explores the coastal ecol­ogy of Ipswich Bay and the Gulf of Maine through a vari­ety of fun daily activ­i­ties, all of which are decided upon the day’s best weather pre­dic­tions and con­ducted accord­ing observed weather, tide and sea states. Above all else, we focus on keep­ing kids warm (or cool!), safe and happy, and we uti­lize both the Erica Lee and BOAT CAMP Inc.’s ocean edu­ca­tion cen­ter to make the best of New England’s change­able weather in order for kids to expe­ri­ence a fun, pos­i­tive boat-based sum­mer program.

They’ve got 3 spots avail­able for kids 9–12 for August  15 — 19.

http://www.boatcamp.org/programs/kids-9–12/

Fishing Boats

posted by professor blue in Do something,Environment,Kids,Learning and have No Comments

You might not see a single thing around you. You’re not alone.

The You Tube® video Once Upon a Tide presents a dif­fer­ent kind of fairy tale.

Lis­ten­ing to the sound a seashell makes, a real liv­ing girl enters into a sad and beau­ti­ful car­toon world of the ocean.  The sto­ry­teller in the video says, “you might find it hard to believe but I assure you it’s true.”

You see under­wa­ter that there is a huge world we do not know much about.  The oceans have pop­u­la­tions of dif­fer­ent ani­mals, loca­tions, light, its own kind of envi­ron­ment.  It is dif­fer­ent than what we human live above ground.  But what we do on land and how we behave directly affects the oceans.  And what goes on in the oceans directly affects the weather.  Which then directly affects us humans on land.  So if the oceans suf­fer, so will we.

once upon a tide

Click here to see –>Once Upon A Tide

Oceans cover more of the earth’s sur­face than rocks and dirt do.  When you look at a map of the world, notice how much water there is, com­pared to the land.

Oceans are very deep.  The lower you go into the water, the darker it gets because the sun­light from above can no longer penetrate.

Morn­ing Earth explains:

Life in the ocean that lives below the sun­light pen­e­tra­tion lives in a three dimen­sional black­ness. They can move in any dimen­sion, but have few clues about where because there are zero land­marks, or bet­ter, signs to tell them where they are. It is hard for gravity-bound beings like us to imag­ine free float­ing all the time. No autotrophs (self-feeders) live here–there is no light to photosynthesize.

When we scuba dive to explore this com­plex world, we are lim­ited by our bod­ies, even if we have very good oxy­gen tanks to breath.  We expe­ri­ence lim­its that we don’t have when we’re out of the water.  The lower we swim down and down into the ocean, the more our bod­ies feel pres­sure on our organs.  And at some point our bod­ies sim­ply can­not dive lower because the pres­sure is too much.

So, sci­en­tists employ other meth­ods to go fur­ther down to explore, using robots and sub­marines with cam­eras, and are able to find the small­est of organ­isms that you can­not see with­out the help of a micro­scope.  You might take a look at drops of water taken from these depths and not be able to see any­thing with just your eyes.  Look at the water using  a micro­scope, and you will truly see life where you could not see it before.

I bet you have never thought of a fairy tale as a micro­scope before, right?

posted by professor blue in Animals,Environment,Organisms,Water and have No Comments
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