Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I'm sure that

everyone listening knows that the planet, the environment, the biosphere of the planet

earth on which we live is in trouble. It has been suffering recently, recent decades,

largely due to activities caused by human beings, such as ourselves. Climate change is a very,

very obvious example of this. Often when we think about climate change, we think of the

atmosphere because we breathe it, right, the weather, the temperatures that we get in the

world around us, it's more complicated than that, of course, even if overall the temperature

is going up, shifts in wind patterns and other climate features can make it colder or

rainier or increase the number of fires or hurricanes or something like that. And guess

what? The ocean is very, very involved in this. The ocean is a huge store of carbon dioxide.

It's a store of biomass that helps us process carbon dioxide. And of course, the ocean

also has a temperature and that temperature is going to help regulate the temperature

of the atmosphere, not to mention the fact that there are ice sheets that are melting

and therefore dumping into the ocean. Furthermore, it's not just climate change that is affecting

our oceans. We're dumping garbage into the oceans, plastics, both big and small. We

are fishing and taking life out of the ocean in incredible numbers. So nobody in the past

few decades has been a more consistent and compelling voice for fixing and protecting

our oceans than today's guests, Sylvia Earl. Sylvia Earl obviously has an incredible

resume in the unlikely event that you are not familiar with her work. I encourage you

to Google or go to the show notes on preposterousunivers.com slash podcast and click on some of

these links. For decades now, since she got her PhD and has become interested in both

the scientific study of the oceans and life in the oceans and also their preservation.

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