Oceans - The Arctic

I suspect that you were all too busy revising or writing coursework on Friday night (hmm...) to be watching the final programme in the excellent Oceans series, where the team went off to explore the Arctic. However, Friday's programme - and the rest of the series (the Southern Ocean one particularly is worth checking out) - is still available on iPlayer... Get watching!

Oceans...

Given how busy you all are at the moment, I don't imagine that many of you will be watching BBC2 at the moment.

If you are, however, you will have seen sea dragons and fantastic sea stacks, and learnt lots about the Southern Ocean and ecosystem management (amongst many other interesting things...).

This was the second of the BBC's Oceans series, looking - unsurprisingly - at the world's oceans, and is well worth having a look at on iPlayer.

The website to accompany the series also has lots of useful and interesting information, images, video clips, etc. Click on the picture below to link to it:

The final programme of the series looks at the team's journey to the Arctic and as well as being worth watching just because it'll be excellent if the two programmes so far are anything to go by, it will be useful for you from a Cold Environments point-of-view and perhaps also from a Recreation and Tourism point-of-view.

The Tundra Biome and the Southern Ocean...

After an introduction from the Mighty Boosh and the wonderful BrainPOP video, we talked about the tundra biome - you have the powerpoint via email, but the key points were:

- types of tundra and global distribution

- low-energy biome and low NPP

- limited biodiversity (just for you Ben...)

- adaptations of plants and animals

- food web

- soil characteristics

For no particular reason other than that you seemed quite impressed with them this morning, a nice picture of a lemming (courtesy of Flickr user kgleditsch under CC):

The exam question that I gave you needs to be finished for Wednesday next week please.

The ecosystem of the Southern Ocean was the final thing that we looked at - rich ecoystem due to the cold water holding plenty of oxygen and carbon dioxide, turbulent waters ensuring a ready supply of nutrients, and long daylight hours for part of the year allowing for plenty of photosynthesis.

And for those of you who preferred chinstrap penguins to lemmings, a rather nice picture from Flickr user robnunn, again under CC: