Posts tagged marine biology
And Somehow, She Persists

For now, I want to share this particularly special experience that is unfolding, right now. I’m on a ship in the Antarctic, specifically the Antarctic Sound on the northeast side of the Western Antarctic Peninsula, with a group of 120 women and non-binary people in STEMM. It’s facilitated by Homeward Bound. Read more here: it’s late, and this girl needs to get to bed.

But I wanted to start a log of our experiences each day, and I need to get caught up before time flashes by and I’m disembarking in Ushuaia in two weeks. Updates will be mostly through photos, as that is the energy level I’m working with currently.

Kinnes Cove

Home to a bustling Adelie penguin colony, with some Gentoos and a random Chinstrap or three thrown into the fray. We saw a sleepy, chunky Weddell seal hauled out on the shoreline, and a few lazy humpbacks cruised past our zodiacs on their way to redder pastures (because of krill, duh).

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Is It Even Possible to Be an Optimistic Environmentalist Anymore?

It seems like you hear all sorts of negative, terrifying, inside-squeezing statistics and study results about the dying marine ecosystems around the world these days and how humans are just destroying all things beautiful in the natural world. It's like someone has gone and painted black streaks over the vibrant blues and greens of the sea of my mind. Sometimes it gets to be too much. There are days when it causes me to panic, and fret, and feel depressed about why I am living in this time period and not one hundred, or even fifty, years ago, when the marine world might have been a lot more pristine. Or at the very least, why couldn't I have paid more attention when I was snorkeling in Cabo and Hawai'i fifteen years ago, or the Great Barrier Reef five years ago, before the bleaching epidemics stripped so many of the reefs of their vitality? Why did I have to start falling in love with the underwater world right as we realize how badly it's hurting? 

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