Helen Czerski Quotes

[A]ll of these platelets, this really intricate structure... is made of so calcium is incorporated into this structure...

[W]e have all these dry numbers and significant wave height is one of them... [W]atching what it really means for a significant wave height to be 10 meters and thinking about how small that is compared to the depth of the ocean... It's like... having a swimming pool and... blowing tiny ripples across the top. ...Being in that situation was... fascinating and fun... I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it was... a special experience.

It's interesting how you can look at the sea and not see it. There's this phrase... that the Merchant Marine use, which is sea blindness... [T]he UK is especially guilty of this... We talk of ourselves as an island nation and we talk... of having this maritime history, and yet we never actually look at the sea... This idea that it can be right there and yet we're somehow blind to it... I was totally guilty of that... being sea blind.

So after the calcium has been part of the cliffs it can crumble down... It goes back into the ocean and this cycle starts all over again.

I've always studied the physics in the middle, even when I was doing my degree. ...I passed my exams in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but I knew I was never going to touch those things, but with the ocean it's something you can directly experience... I'm much more interested in the everyday world than in... s or something.

Physics is awesome... because the same patterns are universal... in the kitchen and in the furthest reaches of the universe.

I was on the Kilo Moana, out of Santa Barbara, on a preparatory cruise for a bigger one... [W]e were in... calm water off Santa Barbara and the Kilo Moana... has swath holes, so a very stable platform kind of a ship, more of a platform than a ship in some sense... [T]hat was the first time I'd ever... hung an instrument over the side... in order to try and measure something... [I]n the second cruise... I made a video of the cruise, like a... mini-documentary...

You don't have to be a qualified scientist to experiment with the world. Knowing some basic principles will set you on the right track... [I]t doesn't even have to be an organized process...

[T]he called two or three... great series, ... but when did they actually say "What is the Blue?"... Not ever addressed.

[T]here are these very famous images in of s swimming, and they've always got these trailing bubbles. ...[N]o one really thought about it until a few years ago at the University of Bangor, a couple of fluid dynamicists... had a bit of think, and it turns out that what the penguins do is really... cool! ...They are constantly preening. The feathers are the most important thing a penguin has because they are its insulation and they are a large part of how hydrodynamic it is. How easy it swims through the water. ...Before the penguin goes down to dive, and they can be quite long dives, the penguins all fluff up their feathers and trap gas... bubbles underneath.

[E]ven the ocean scientists don't really know all the little stories, the places where it's mattered in history... [S]o I went looking for those.

And then they go down, and they go hunting for fish... [I]t comes time to go back up to the surface and hop out onto the ice past the s.

It wasn't my first time at sea. It was my first time in waves that big.

Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!

It's very, very important to make the point that there are lots of ways to be an oceanographer. You don't have to go to sea... I would say to people, "I'm a physicist. I'm not an oceanographer." and they would go, "Oh you go to sea, so you're an oceanographer." But actually now we have much better data availability, data visualization... There are lots of people involved in coding and modeling and building devices and the engineering, who don't go to sea. But they are part of the ocean science community, and it's very, very important that they are there.