Explore our amazing blue planet at Southampton Boat Show
The University of Southampton will give visitors to this year’s Southampton Boat Show (11-20 September) an exciting opportunity to explore our blue planet, from marine life in our local waters to some of the deepest parts of the world’s oceans.
The University’s Ocean and Earth Science team will be opening the doors to a ‘pop-up’ aquarium, at stand A134, housing marine species ranging from local jelly fish to coral found in the Red Sea. There will be film footage from deep-sea expeditions around volcanic vents, tanks and rock pools filled with fascinating creatures from local waters and a dark-room containing coral and anemones that have a natural ability to emit fluorescent light.
Scientists and students from the University will be on hand to offer their expert insights and answer questions from visitors.
Moira MacLean, Senior Research Assistant at the University of Southampton, says: “The oceans are vital to the long-term health of our unique blue planet. We hope that by giving people a glimpse into life below the sea, people will gain a greater appreciation of how amazing our oceans are.”
For the marine scientists of the future
The Boat show will play host to the launch of our fundraising campaign for a replacement research boat for the teaching and research community at Ocean and Earth Science.
In the interest of maintaining our high quality learning environment our fundraising objective is to replace one of our research vessels, RV Bill Conway who has given us a valued service but is now coming to the end of her seafaring career. We will be giving visitors the opportunity to find out more about this exciting campaign and to see how our research boats add value to our student’s teaching and research experience. The new vessel will give us scope to improve our capabilities for teaching and research at sea in the areas of oceanography, marine biology, geology and geophysics and will play a significant role in outreach and charter activities to benefit the local region.
Find out more about our fundraising campaign or if you would like to donate, please follow the link below. If you would like to know more at the Boat show, please ask a member of our staff, we’d be happy to answer any questions.
"I regularly go to sea and can confidently use equipment and sampling techniques I learnt on the R.V. Bill Conway such as collecting water samples and data with a CTD rosette, taking biological samples, documenting metadata, survey design, and habitat mapping. Collecting the data myself, in situ, really deepened my understanding of the environment I was studying in a way that cannot be done in a lecture theatre – there is no replacement for first-hand experience."
Dr Harriet Cole
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