5/30/2023 0 Comments Blue planet deep seaTeachable Moments: The open ocean is often referred to as a "marine desert." This may seem contradictory to students, who perceive a desert as a hot, dry, sandy ecosystem. Key Concepts: Open ocean, aquatic ecosystems, euphotic zone, adaptations. This is a great opportunity to show how these factors drastically impact the biodiversity found within each oceanic zone. Temperatures drop, pressure increases, and sunlight fades away. Teachable Moments: The entire nature of the oceanic ecosystem changes as one travels deeper and deeper into the abyss. Key Concepts: Oceanic zones, euphotic zone, disphotic zone, aphotic zone, photosynthesis, chemosynthesis, adaptation, camouflage. Tip for teachers: Use closed captioning! Many of the animals and plants have very unusual names with very unusual spellings! Seeing them in text makes it much easier for the students to follow! I have not written anything for the first episode entitled "The Blue Planet", as it is largely a recap of the other episodes.Įach episode provides a tremendous opportunity for "teachable moments." Whether your focus is biology, earth science, or ecology, there is a good chance your concepts are covered by one more more of these episodes. The worksheets and student guides I have written for this series are all based on the BBC version starring David Attenborough as the narrator. There are a total of 8 episodes of Blue Planet. Each of the 50-minute episodes covers a different aspect of marine life. That pattern of life is hard to see from samples collected by nets or trawls in the past, so our first minisub dives to 1km deep in the Antarctic should help to make that “white space” no longer such a blank.The Blue Planet is a documentary series released in 2001 by the BBC. But if you’re at the bottom of a gully, then lots of dropstones end up there, giving a major boost to local biodiversity. As we found on our dives, they slide down steeper undersea slopes, actually scraping off marine life. But where the dropstones settle depends on the undersea terrain. “Dropstones” are car-sized boulders that fall from passing icebergs – they provide “islands” of rocky habitat for filter-feeding species which otherwise don’t get a look-in on the soft mud of the Antarctic seafloor. ![]() Overall, seeing the deep Antarctic sea floor close-up from our minisubs should help us to understand how “dropstones” shape the pattern of life here.
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