GSO graduate student Carrie McDonough attended a Communicating Science Conference in June, 2013, where she met some of the graduate students who run astrobites.org, a blog that makes astrophysics research more accessible to broad audiences. At the conference, students were encouraged to discuss starting their own blogs in other fields. The group discuessed ideas for blogs on a wide range of topics, but no one thought to mention oceanography. Later, thinking about how strongly oceanography captures the public imagination, Carrie realized that a site highlighting Earth’s oceans would be an ideal sister site to the astrobites blog dealing with phenomena in outer space.

Carrie asked students and faculty around GSO what they thought of the idea, and was delighted at the amount of enthusiasm she encountered. She found that graduate students were eager to participate. Thus, oceanbites.org was born. oceanbites.org is a blog in which graduate students explain recent research in the marine sciences at a level accessible to anyone with a high school education. oceanbites makes cutting-edge oceanography research more accessible to the public, and provides graduate students with an opportunity to gain experience communicating their science.  Contributors edit each other’s posts and work to explain complex ideas in concise, compelling terms. The blog now has 14 contributors hailing from University of Rhode Island, University of Florida, and Victoria University, New Zealand.

In the future, the group hopes to add features to the site such as interviews with oceanographers and contributions from undergraduate researchers. Students interested in becoming oceanbites contributors can learn how to apply at http://oceanbites.org/contact-us/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of oceanbites’ contributors (Left to right): In back – M. Elisabeth Henderson, Brian Caccioppoli, Carrie McDonough, Yiya Huang, Gordon Ober. In front: Cathleen Turner, Erin Markham, Kari St. Laurent.