Made to Degrade

The revelatory moment came for Melissa Omand when she, a physical oceanographer by training, saw her husband, Ben, struggling to develop an ocean sensor instrument without using plastics, expending effort for a device and racking up costs as he tested alternative materials. “And the instruments were pretty much a failure,” she recalls. “It is so […]

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Rats From a Distant Archipelago are Rewriting Our Understanding of Human History

  Ancient navigators once relied on the seasonal monsoon winds to make long distance voyages across the northern Indian Ocean, linking Arabia and Egypt to India and China. There was also a lesser known southern monsoon trade route linking Asia directly to sub-Saharan Africa, but no one is sure exactly when or from where it […]

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Global Warming and Rising Seas Threaten the Barrier Islands of Belize

  I am writing this article while having the absolute pleasure of co-teaching one of the University of Rhode Island’s (URI) January-Term (J-Term) field schools along with two of our most talented educators, Professor Rod Mather, marine historical archaeologist, College of Arts & Sciences, and Diving Safety Officer Anya Hanson, director of URI’s diving research […]

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