About Us
The Ocean Sciences Department is an inclusive, supportive, and innovative community of people involved in oceanography and other marine sciences. We offer undergraduate and graduate courses in these disciplines. Students have access to a wide variety of research facilities and equipment through faculty sponsors. In addition to research and instructional activities along the California coast, interests of the core faculty and their students include biological, chemical, and physical oceanography; sediment, marine, organic, and trace metal biogeochemistry; marine plankton, phytoplankton ecology, paleoceanography, aquatic microbial ecology, ecological modeling, and remote sensing (satellite oceanography); numeric modeling of coastal and basin-scale dynamics; midwater ecology and climatology, among others.
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The latest high-impact science in Ocean Sciences
Ecological Society of America names Dan Costa a lifetime fellow
Dan Costa, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences, has been named a 2024 Fellow of the Ecological Society of America.
Industrial fishing poses greater risk to marine life due to untracked activity, UC Santa Cruz researchers find
A new study led by a scientist at UC Santa Cruz’s Institute of Marine Sciences finds that blue whales, tunas, and other top predators in the northeast Pacific Ocean face greater risk of harm from industrial fishing than previously thought.
Scientists begin to crack open climate-change riddles hiding in ancient coral
An international team of researchers on an expedition co-led by UC Santa Cruz Professor Christina Ravelo collected cores of fossil coral off the coast of Hawai’i to look for signs of climate and sea-level change over the past half million years.