pale blue dot
French freediving champion Guillaume Néry, and his wife, the French freediver, underwater filmmaker, and dancer Julie Gautier published an amazing freediving video titled “One breath around the world”. In the video, Néry plunges into the ocean’s hidden depths, revealing remarkable views of marine geology and wildlife, without the aid of supplied air. There are many …
Continue reading “Dancing with the whales – amazing freediving video!”
Reported by the sailors at least since the 19th century, a rogue wave is a very large, extremely steep, unexpected and suddenly appearing surface wave. It is also called as a freak wave, monster wave, killer wave, and extreme wave. For centuries, seamen told stories about encounters with extremely big, ship-sinking waves, much bigger than …
Continue reading “What is a Rogue Wave and why they are so dangerous”
As I scuba dive in Oslob Bay off Cebu Island in the Philippines, I see a tiny shadow dart over the surface of the spherical coral block – a minute fish, a goby of the genus Eviota, among the smallest vertebrates in existence, only about a centimetre long and less than 1/10th of a gramme …
Continue reading “Is bigger always better, or will the tiny inherit the Earth?”
The blue whale (scientific name: Balaenoptera musculus) is a marine mammal belonging to the baleen whales (Mysticeti). Up to 31 meters (102 feet) in length and 190 tonnes (210 short tons) in weight, it is the largest extant animal and also is the heaviest known to have existed. But it’s hard to conceptualize how big …
Continue reading “Blue whale facts: How big is the blue whale?”
Our planet is getting warmer, at an increasing pace. This month, there was three bad, very bad news about global warming. According to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Antarctica is losing six times more ice mass annually now than 40 years ago. Another study, published in the scientific journal …
Continue reading “Global Warming: Three bad (very bad!) news”
A woman was swimming on 4 December 2018 at Hahei Beach on the Coromandel peninsular, New Zealand. Then a pod of orcas (killer whales) swam up to her (probably a mother and two calves), and circled her. They kept swimming around her while she was headed to the shore. Especially the mother swam really close to her. A …
Would you like to have the ability to transform back to a younger version of yourself? Meet Immortal Jellyfish (scientific name: Turritopsis dohrnii), the only species on Earth which can live (theoretically, at least) an eternal life.
In the middle of the South Pacific Ocean, there’s a location called “Point Nemo”. It’s not a place that humans live – in fact, there is no land there – not an island, not even a small rock. It is actually the remotest place from any human civilization you can find on Earth. It lies …
What are the biggest great white sharks ever recorded? The great white shark (scientific name: Carcharodon carcharias) is not the biggest shark (that title goes to the whale shark), but they are the largest predatory fish on Earth. According to the Guinness World Records Book, full-grown adults are average 4.3-4.6 meters (14-15 feet) in length, …
The world is running out of the marine sand, and we are depleting this natural resource by over 40 billion tons on an annual basis. While this seems nearly impossible to imagine, there are several key factors to understand why our sand overuse is becoming a serious environmental issue.
