[SEMCO] Plastics at SEA Lecture January 19 1PM

[Jill Tompkins]

*For Immediate Release:* Date: Sunday, January 19, 2014
Time: 1-2 PM
Place: Sea Education
Association<http://www.sea.edu/sea_news/fall_lecture_series>

                James Madden Center Lecture Hall

                171 Woods Hole Road

                Falmouth, MA
Free and Open to the Public
Presented by Dr. Kara Lavender Law, Research professor of Oceanography, Sea
Education Association.

*Title:*  Plastics at SEA:  The science of ocean "garbage patches"

*Presentation Summary*

Ocean pollution by plastic and other man-made debris is a pressing
environmental problem that has captured the attention of marine
conservationists, anti-plastic activists, the media and the general public.
 Although the problem was first described in the 1970s, scientific
attention to the topic has increased only recently and misconceptions about
the problem are common.  At SEA, students and scientists began collecting
data on floating plastic debris in the 1980s.  Since then SEA has collected
nearly 10,000 measurements of plastic debris in the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans, and research efforts have expanded to include dedicated research
expeditions to the North Atlantic and North Pacific "garbage patches", as
well as federally-funded research programs to study the behavior of plastic
in the marine environment and its ecological impacts.    Dr. Lavender Law
will discuss the state of scientific research on marine debris in the
world's oceans, with an in-depth look at the research carried out for more
than 25 years by undergraduate students and faculty scientists on sailing
oceanographic research vessels at SEA.

*Biosketch*

Dr. Kara Lavender Law is a research professor at Sea Education Association
with a PhD in physical oceanography from Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, and a BS in mathematics from Duke University.  With more than
12 months of sea time on oceanographic and sailing research vessels, Dr.
Law’s research interests include large-scale and mesoscale ocean
circulation, intermediate and deep water formation in the North Atlantic
and its role in the meridional overturning circulation, and more recently
the distribution and behavior of plastic marine debris.

Formerly on the teaching faculty at SEA, Dr. Law has taught oceanography to
more than 200 students in 10 SEA Semester classes onshore in Woods Hole, MA
and at sea in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the Caribbean Sea.  For
the past several years Dr. Law has been researching plastic marine debris
using SEA's 25-year data set consisting of plastic counts from nearly
10,000 plankton net tows that were carried out by more than 7000 SEA
students and scientists. Her interests include understanding how ocean
physics determines the distribution of plastic and other marine debris, and
the degradation and ultimate fate of different plastic materials in the
marine environment.


*About Sea Education Association*



For more than 40 years, Sea Education Association has offered undergraduate
students a hands-on, field-based education about the world’s oceans.
Offering fully accredited SEA Semester® study abroad programs at sea, SEA
has sailed more than one million nautical miles since 1971.  They currently
own and operate two brigantine sailing research vessels in the Pacific and
Atlantic, the SSV *Robert C. Seamans* and the SSV *Corwith Cramer*.  SEA
offers more than $1 million dollars annually in need-based financial aid
and scholarships for SEA Semester students, and is located in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.sea.edu.

-- 
Jill Tompkins, CFRE
Grants & Contracts Coordinator
*508-540-3954 x576*
http://sea.edu/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.whoi.edu/pipermail/semco/attachments/20131230/a7019537/attachment.htm