Talking About The Ocean To People That Have Never Seen It
By Daniel de la Calle I apologize for not having posted any entries since last year. As a little kid I loved the whole early January game of not-having-seen, not-having-done, not-having-eaten or drank something “since LAST YEAR”. In this case, though, it really feels like an unfairly long time. I happen to be in Brazil […]
When You Reach Maturity
By Daniel de la Calle A couple blog entries ago I mentioned A Sea Change has been present so far at more than fifty film festivals worldwide. We have a saying in Spanish that goes: “life is but a sigh”, partly to show our tragic sense of life, but mainly to stress its brevity. The […]
Coevolution
By Daniel de la Calle I am in Paris now, just for a couple weeks, and my visit has coincided with a fantastic documentary film festival called Pariscience. From medicine to biology, botany to meteorology, computer or space science, the selection encompasses an impressively broad range of fields of study and research. For example, yesterday […]
On Drowning
By Daniel de la Calle I was 9 years old in 1981 when a local diver submerged a marble image of the Virgin of Carmen on the beach in front of my house as a sign of gratitude for a personal favor or miracle granted. At the time the event barely made the news, but […]
Screening at the Oil Company
By Daniel de la Calle from Ipanema Beach, Brazil This past Friday the 28th A Sea Change screened at the CENPES center in Rio de Janeiro. It is a massive 25 acre complex that employs over 1,500 biologists, chemists, marine ecologists and engineers working in interdisciplinary groups at the Petrobras headquarters, one of the leading […]
The Highest High, The Lowest Low
By Daniel de la Calle Today is World Water Day. All kinds of events must be taking place around the planet with the spotlight on water, on its current state and its importance to us living creatures. Some of them will surely point out our dependency on good water and the paradoxical way we treat […]
News, Links and Videos
By Daniel de la Calle Some news on Ocean Acidification from the past few weeks: ¤ NOAA has released a new page on Ocean Acidification that delivers general information on the topic and describes the work that the National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration is carrying out. A couple links to the content and nice […]
News: What Blogs Are For
By Daniel de la Calle Here is the classic list of web finds you have seen right here in the past. This week I dug out two great videos, info about a workshop in China, a job offer, some news and a literary reference, clearly enough to enhance your weekend experience. Echinoderms will be fine. […]
Blog Post Comments Worth Being Blog Posts
By Hilary, Colin and Daniel de la Calle On my last post I wrote about a University of Florida Research that might have solved “the mystery of where old carbon was stored during the last glacial period”, the answer being that it “ended up in the icy waters of the Southern Ocean near Antarctica.” I […]
Looking Out The Window In Belo Horizonte…
By Daniel de la Calle I only see favela neighborhoods clinging onto the hills, some dirty wet streets, cars, buses and trucks that knit a visible veil of pollution. Belo Horizonte means “Beautiful Horizon” and it probably was at some point. I am sure things were very different 100 years back, but that beautiful horizon […]
I Am Costly
By Daniel de la Calle I confess I get irritated by the carbon footprint/credit scheme. Some months ago I did some research to try to understand just how carbon credits work, where you can buy them, how individual and national emissions are measured and I found the system to be complicated, bias, Kafkaesque. Here we […]
Enough of the “evil twin”
By Daniel de la Calle They might partly share its origin, but Ocean Acidification is not the “evil twin” of Global Warming. They operate in quite a different fashion and their effects upon the planet, both present and future, even contrasting at times. Most importantly though, this “evil twin” business indirectly implies that there is […]
Brazil, Lessons in Coexistence and Incongruence
By Daniel de la Calle What you see below is Brazil: While going through some of the pictures I took here I was struck by the realization that exactly what makes this country so fascinating is what turns it so easy to hate, impossible not to love, so tricky to fully grasp. Everything happens together, […]
Please welcome: the amazing octopus
By Daniel de la Calle During my first year of college I studied Law. I did not know what to do and my father was convinced it suited me, so between nothing and Law, Law it was. For two semesters the only lectures that caught my attention were about Roman Law. Not only was the […]
Pearls in Vinegar
By Daniel de la Calle I am a very slow museum visitor. Last month I went to the Louvre for a couple of hours on three consecutive days and did not even make it through the marvelous Egyptian wing. When I was a kid, one of the first stories that fascinated me about ancient Egypt […]
Monday’s Smorgasbord
By Daniel de la Calle Every few weeks there is a new one, March was not going to be an exception. Here you go, the list of A Sea Change news, Ocean Acidification videos and assorted internet links. ¤¤ Barbara and Sven spent this past month on the West Coast attending screenings, meeting people, […]
Some News, Some Information
By Daniel de la Calle Our poor blog has remained silent for over two weeks. I do not know how to make excuses sound like explanations, so my excuses are that I was busy showing Barbara Ettinger (our director) and Sven Huseby (our protagonist) my side of the world and after their departure I suffered […]
THE END OF OCEAN ACIDIFICATION (Our contribution to April Fools Day)
By Daniel de la Calle This is probably the most exciting and positive news of my life. Reading The London Times this morning I could hardly hold the tears, tears of joy and relief for once. While I am aware there are plenty other hazards and pending threats to the environment and that this is […]
THE CENSUS OF MARINE LIFE
By Daniel de la Calle This month the Census of Marine Life (COML) project announced the results of their mammoth work since the year 2000, one of the biggest collaborations in the history of science with 2,700 researchers from 80 countries embarked in a total of 540 logged ocean expeditions. The total cost of the […]
Pteropod inspired art
Phyllis Lam is a biology student at the University of Rochester. After recently watching A Sea Change in Dr. Terry Platt’s Biology class she wrote to Barbara Ettinger, our director, to thank her for the meaningful work the film is doing. She said: “I am shocked and concerned about the serious problem of ocean acidification. Global […]
Oceanic News
By Daniel de la Calle I just spent five hours flying over the Atlantic and as a tribute to it have decided to list five nuggets of information about our oceans, those two thirds of Earth that we normally see as highways, supermarkets, dumpsters, bounties of riches or playgrounds, but are seldom given the importance […]
Win the A SEA CHANGE DVD!
By Daniel de la Calle I had not heard about Ocean Acidification until I began working for Niijii Films on A Sea Change. The research, the people we talked to, experts we interviewed, places we saw have affected me deeply. If I had to describe it in a nutshell I would highlight two aspects: I […]
“The Death of the Oceans?”
By Daniel de la Calle Same day the Census For Marine Life made public the results of those ten years of research (read October 16th blog post) the BBC broadcast a new documentary narrated by David Attenborough and titled “The Death of the Oceans?”. The hour long film shows the outstanding marine footage we have […]
An Alternative Soundtrack
By Daniel de la Calle On last Wednesday’s post I forgot to mention the following astounding coincidence on the BBC’s “The End of the Oceans?” documentary: just as David Attenborough talks about Ocean Acidification Philip Glass’ Closing is played, a theme that is part of the A Sea Change soundtrack. Isn’t that something? This led […]
Angry Denials
By Daniel de la Calle The internet, that jungle out there. If you have looked for articles about ocean acidification or any of the uncountable environmental problems we are facing I am certain you have already stumbled upon a website or personal blog where it is all refuted and mocked, most times with a shockingly […]