Marine Biology

We have better maps of the surface of Mars than we do of Earth's ocean floor.

The most important organism on Earth is one you've probably never heard of.

A blue whale eats 4 tons of krill per day.

Coral reefs cover less than 0.1% of the ocean floor but host roughly 25% of all marine species.

The Great Barrier Reef has lost half its coral cover since 1995.

In 1977, a submersible called Alvin descended 2,500 meters off the Galápagos Islands to investigate underwater volcanic activity.

A blue whale's heart is the size of a small car.

The ocean has absorbed roughly 90% of the excess heat generated by human-caused climate change.

A cone snail in the Indo-Pacific produces a venom containing roughly 200 different toxins.

In 2018, researchers off the coast of Norway scooped up a single liter of seawater.

That's nearly two-thirds of the world's largest, most biodiverse, and most ecologically important ecosystem — and it sits in a legal space called the high seas, where no single nation can prohibit fishing, mining, or environmental degradation on its own.