Oceanography is defined as the study of the physical, chemical, and biological features of the ocean, including the ocean’s ancient history, its current condition, and its future. The modern study of oceanography only ushered in around 150 years ago, through flagship scientific expeditions, most notably the one circumnavigating the global ocean over five years (1872-1876) by the HMS Challenger, which managed to complete 492 deep-sea soundings, 133 bottom dredges, 151 open water trawls and 263 serial water temperature observations over the 130,000 kilometres of sea it navigated.

The need to study the oceanography has never been as contemporary and as compelling as today, given the inherent role played by the ocean in climate regulation. For instance, the ocean is reputed to absorb at least 25 per cent of all the excess carbon dioxide being spewed into the atmosphere, besides, more significantly, anything between 75 per cent and 90 per cent of the surplus atmospheric heat, by acting as a giant conveyor belt which shuttles heat from the tropics to the poles, just like a giant car radiator, through what oceanographers call the ‘thermohaline circulation.’

Despite this important regulatory role, the ocean is facing the brunt of unprecedented human impacts, whose footprint is even extending to the High Seas, that extensive swathe of sea far from the continents and which does not fall within any national jurisdiction, covering around 45 per cent of the planet. Seabed mining at hundreds of metres of depth, to tap into buried deposits of rare and precious metals, is looming around the horizon in fact, despite the exact environmental impacts of such an activity not being fully understood.

The Oceanography Malta Research Group within the Department of Geosciences at the University of Malta offers, on an annual basis, a full-time Master Course in Applied Oceanography. The course is tailor-made for postgraduate students with a first degree in science, geography, earth systems, environmental studies, engineering, architecture or computing, as well as to mid-career professionals aiming to supplement their background with a grounding in oceanography and in marine and maritime studies.

The course includes a study visit abroad, extensive hands-on, field exercises involving the deployment of instrumentation (e.g. a week-long boot camp aboard a vessel) as well as a placement/internship within a local company of public entity and training on communication skills. Potential career openings accessible to oceanography graduates include environmental management entities (e.g. the ERA), consultancy companies engaged in the conduction of EIA (environmental impact assessment) studies as well as policy-making entities (e.g. ministries) and marine modelling and forecasting service provision (e.g. Met Office, Transport Malta).

Further information about the same course can be gleaned here

Sound Bites

•        More than 20 years after the first release of the human genome, scientists at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne, have for the first time decoded the highly complex genome of the potato. This technically demanding study lays the biotechnological foundation to accelerate the breeding of more robust varieties – a goal in plant breeding for many years and an important step for global food security.

•        Rice University bioengineers have shown they can eradicate advanced-stage ovarian and colorectal cancer in mice in as little as six days with a treatment that could be ready for human clinical trials later this year. The researchers used implantable “drug factories” the size of a pinhead to deliver continuous, high doses of interleukin-2, a natural compound that activates white blood cells to fight cancer. The drug-producing beads can be implanted with minimally invasive surgery. Each contains cells engineered to produce interleukin-2 that are encased in a protective shell.

For more soundbites, listen to Radio Mocha every Saturday at 7.30pm on Radju Malta and the following Monday at 9pm on Radju Malta 2 https://www.fb.com/RadioMochaMalta/.

DID YOU KNOW?

•        An offshoot of Newton’s apple tree was blown down by storm Eunice. The original tree was blown down by a storm in 1820.

•        The January 2022 Tonga underwater volcano triggered nearly 590,000 lightning strikes in three days, 400,000 of them within six hours of the eruption.  I wonder who counted them.

•        A gyascutus is an imaginary large four-legged beast with legs on one side longer than the other so it can walk on hillsides.

•        In 1991, in the first democratic elections after communist rule, the Polish Beer-Lover’s Party (Polska Partia Przyjaciół Piwa or The PPPP) won 16 seats in the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament.

For more trivia, see www.um.edu.mt/think.

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