SeaWeek is Australia’s major national public awareness campaign to focus community awareness, provide information and encourage an appreciation of the sea. SeaWeek gives us a fantastic opportunity to promote educational issues of relevance to the marine environment.
To recognise Sea Week 2021 Virtual Excursions Australia is promoting digital resources and virtual excursions between the 8 – 12 March.
My Journey Beneath the Waves
My Journey Beneath the Waves: Diving Sydney’s Rocky Reefs takes you and your students on an exploration of the marine environment. The temperate waters around Sydney are home to a variety of habitats including kelp beds and sponge gardens. These are wonderful place to dive and discover the diversity of animals that live there.
Karen Player shares some of her favourite diving stories to highlight the amazing animals that live in Sydney Rocky Reefs. Take a journey beneath the waves to explore this wonderful world. Learn about some of these incredible animals, their adaptions and habitats.
Scientists of R/V Falkor
Join some of the inspiring female Scientists from the Schmidt Ocean Institute to get a taste of the exciting science careers aboard R/V Falkor. This panel will celebrate International Women’s day by bringing together women in the marine sciences of all career levels and background to discuss their diverse paths and experiences, and promote the visibility of women in the marine science community.
Making Connections with Communities
Join us for a conversation with a team of pioneering female geologists, ecologists and botanists from the University of Tasmania who will be discussing their experience as women working in Science and the ways of communicating and raising awareness of science-related issues and topics. They will explore the opportunities to collaborate with other academic disciplines and how to make connections with the wider community.
Tackling global challenges
Find out more about the career opportunities in marine science from a group of inspiring female scientists at the University of Tasmania’s Institute of Marine and Antarctic Science and the Centre for Socioecology. Our speakers will tell you about their travels to the Antarctic and the Tropics, and discuss the significant contributions that Marine Scientists can make to global environmental challenges through understanding ecosystems and our diverse impacts on them.
An Ocean Journey with Plankton
Delve into the world of plankton – a group of microscopic plants and animals with incredible importance for aquatic food webs worldwide. This talk will first introduce the ecology and biology of these organisms followed by a Q+A.
Raissa Gill will share her experience from finishing high school in 2012 to where she is today, and will talk about some scientific research that she’s been involved in over the past two years, including her work on the citizen science project “Adrift” and her honours research project on the implications of temperature variability on photosynthetic plankton.
Online Resources
Australian Environmental Education
Oceans contain the greatest diversity of life on Earth. Habitats range from the freezing polar regions to the warm waters of the coral reefs, deep sea hydrothermal vents to shallow seagrass beds and beautiful sponge gardens to giant kelp forests, marine organisms are found everywhere.
Diving Stories
Marine resources
Ocean Life Education
Landcare Learning Centre: Caring for our Coasts.
Australia is home to the over 10,000 beaches and no part of Australia is more than 1,000km from the ocean. Our coasts are impacted by our actions on land. Rubbish and microplastics can be found washed up on almost every Australian beach.
Pollution and rubbish get washed into our rivers and waterways with stormwater runoff and end up on our coasts and oceans. Over 75% of this rubbish is plastic. Plastics in the environment can take hundreds of years to break down, thereby impacting marine species for generations.
