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(This program is no longer streaming). Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in a fiery global catastrophe. But we know little about how their successors, the mammals, recovered and took over the world. Now, hidden inside ordinary-looking rocks, an astonishing trove of fossils reveals a dramatic new picture of how rat-sized creatures ballooned in size and began to evolve into the vast array of species—from cheetahs to bats to whales to humans—that rule our planet today.

Amazing fossils reveal how mammals took over after an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs.

Rise of the Mammals

From singing whales and squeaking bats to thumping spiders and clicking dolphins, the world is filled with the exotic sounds of our fellow creatures. What are they saying? While we believe language sets us apart, some animals demonstrate they can learn our language—like Chaser the dog, who recognizes hundreds of words, and Kanzi the bonobo, who appears to have a sophisticated understanding of spoken English. But can we decode their own communications? NOVA Wonders follows researchers around the globe who are deciphering an amazing array of clues that reveal how animals share information critical to their survival. Will we one day be able to write the bat dictionary or decode the hidden sign language of chimps? And what can these findings tell us about the roots of our own language?

Can we crack the code of animal communication?

What Are Animals Saying?

(This program is no longer available for online streaming.) A seven-mile-wide asteroid collided with Earth 66 million years ago, triggering a chain of events that coincide with the end of the dinosaurs. But experts have long debated exactly what happened when the asteroid struck and how the giant beasts met their end. Now, scientists have uncovered compelling new clues about the catastrophe—from New Jersey to the wilds of Patagonia—and an international expedition of scientists has drilled into the impact crater off the coast of Mexico, recovering crucial direct evidence of the searing energy and giant tsunami unleashed by the asteroid. Join NOVA as scientists piece together a chillingly precise unfolding of the Earth’s biggest cataclysm, moment by moment, and discover how our early mammalian ancestors managed to survive and repopulate the Earth. (Premiered December 27, 2017)

Experts drill into the impact crater of an asteroid that created a worldwide cataclysm.

Day the Dinosaurs Died

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Cats Might Be One of the Most Invasive Species

Cats are responsible for hundreds of millions, if not billions of birds being eaten every year.
Non-native species, like cats and honeybees, can either become naturalized, as a part of the ecosystem, or invasive and disrupt the ecosystem.
Cats Might Be One of the Most Invasive SpeciesPublished November 16, 2022 DANNI WASHINGTON: So, invasive giant hornets are a problem, because they could potentially wipe out honeybees and impact America’s food supply. We still don’t know if they can be eradicated in North America, but the clock is ticking, driving scientists and locals to take action, because we not only love, but depend on, the native honeybee.FRANK MAZZOTTI: The honeybee is non-native.DANNI WASHINGTON: Wait, what?FRANK MAZZOTTI: Well, in some of these species, that gets to another end of a definition. Some non-native species become naturalized, and that is, that’s kind of the opposite of invasive. And that is, they become part of the ecosystem that they’ve been introduced to and fit into the ecosystem. And so, there are naturalized non-native species as well as invasive non-native species.DANNI WASHINGTON: Okay, so let’s get this straight. Non-native species are the ones that have moved into new ecosystems. And, like Frank says, such species can become either naturalized, as a part of the ecosystem, or invasive and disrupt the ecosystem. But species have been moving around the world for millions of years. So, does that mean every plant and animal could have been considered “non-native” and potentially “invasive” at some point in Earth’s history? Could North America’s beloved honeybees have been, for a time, invasive and outcompeting native pollinators? What else?FRANK MAZZOTTI: Cats.DANNI WASHINGTON: You’re killing me, Frank.FRANK MAZZOTTI: Cats eat birds, eat small mammals, eat reptiles and are responsible for hundreds of millions, if not billions of birds being eaten every year. Cats are one of the most invasive species. Cats get a pass because people do like them.SHARLENE SANTANA: They shouldn’t get a pass. Going to anger all the cat people. It’s okay, I’m a dog person. I own it.

Cats are responsible for hundreds of millions, if not billions of birds being eaten every year.

Divers Hunt Venomous Fish Invading Our Oceans

Divers help turn the lionfish’s Atlantic invasion into a commercial opportunity.
Without any natural predators, invasive lionfish populations grow unchecked and wreak havoc on marine ecosystems. Watch free divers hunt these poisonous fish.
Divers Hunt Venomous Fish Invading Our Oceans Published November 8, 2022 NARRATOR: The lionfish. Along the Atlantic coast, they have gone from population zero to top predator, in mere decades. Joline ten Haken and Farra Figaroa have taken up hunting lionfish for side income.FARRA FIGAROA (Freediver): Almost every weekend we catch lionfish, yeah.JOLINE TEN HAKEN (Freediver): You feel very free, because you’re without any equipment. It’s just ourselves and our, our bodies and our stamina. One of us has got the zookeeper and the other one went looking for fish. And as soon as we saw one, we just go down and we try to catch him.FARRA FIGAROA: Yeah. I also do it as a side job. I’m 15, and I always wanted to have a side job and get a lot of, a little bit of money to buy things. No, it’s a really good day. Yeah. Like nine kilos, I guess. It’s, yeah, I think it’s nine kilos. It’s a lot. Now we’re going to put them in a cooler, and then we bring it to a restaurant where they sell them, where they sell the lionfish. They make a lot of dishes.JOLINE TEN HAKEN: It’s very funny story. In fact, Farra actually didn’t eat fish before she started hunting lionfish. And now she hunts lionfish, she had to start eating them. And she actually really likes them.DANNI WASHINGTON: Farra and Joline are two of the many divers on the island who have helped turn the lionfish’s Atlantic invasion into a commercial opportunity. As awareness builds, invasive lionfish are becoming an increasingly popular local dish. The fish can be used to create island favorites, whether it’s ceviche or fried whole.

Divers help turn the lionfish’s Atlantic invasion into a commercial opportunity.

Side view of a lion fish against a black background, it's long spines splayed out

Two species of invasive lionfish have been spreading rapidly throughout the Caribbean, and along the Atlantic coasts of North and South America for nearly 40 years. Image Credit: Alt Eduard, Shutterstock

What to do with an invasive fish? Make leather

It seems like an ordinary leather wallet, neatly stitched, with a slight sheen. “It looks like leather, smells like leather,” says Aarav Chavda, CEO and co-founder of Inversa Leathers. Twist or fold it, and you might notice it’s “wickedly” strong, thanks to a unique fiber structure. Look closer, and you might see the delicate lattice of ridgelines that once held scales in place. But it’s not made from lizard skin. And it’s certainly not cow hide. It’s lionfish.
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“We create leather from this horrible invasive species,” Chavda says. Inversa’s work is one attempt to solve an ecological crisis, albeit in an unexpected way. Or, as Chavda puts it, “Wait what, how does a handbag save the coral reefs?”Lionfish look unlike anything else on the reef, with striking red-brown zebra stripes and huge venomous spines that fan out around them. Native to the Indo-Pacific region and the Red Sea, they’ve long been popular in home aquariums. But in the 1980s, a few individuals either escaped or were released off the coast of Florida. Away from the creatures that normally control their populations, these invasive lionfish have become voracious top predators: <a href="https://manoa.hawaii.edu/biology/sites/manoa.hawaii.edu.biology/files/users/hixonm/albins_hixon_13_ebf.pdf">One study</a> found that lionfish can kill 79% of juvenile fish on a reef in just five weeks. And since many of those fish eat algae off corals, their disappearance can set off a domino effect that kills the reefs, as well. Over the past few decades, the swiftly reproducing lionfish have spread up and down the Atlantic coast and <a href="/wgbh/nova/article/blackinnature-tropical-paleontology/">throughout the Caribbean</a> with shocking speed. Now, having been introduced via the Suez Canal, they’re even taking over the Mediterranean. <h4>Watch: Ocean Invaders</h4>
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Fishing may seem like an obvious solution, but traps and lines don’t fool lionfish. The best way to remove them from an area <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/force-blue/">is by spearfishing</a>. So to stop this underwater disaster, coastal communities are trying to give divers a reason to go out and catch them. Some host lionfish derbies with cash prizes. Local restaurants have begun preparing lionfish meat in dishes like ceviche and fish tacos. Artisans make earrings out of the fish’s fearsome spines. And in 2020, Chavda and fellow scuba diver COO Roland Salatino founded Inversa. Now, they pay solo hunters and fishing collectives in a dozen countries around the Caribbean and Mediterranean to harvest the fish for their skin.After starting with just a few divers, Inversa now works with a cast of thousands, promising reliable and prompt payment for their catch and teaching them how to deal with the risk of sting, which is painful but not lethal. Sometimes that means the company sponsors its own lionfish derbies; other times it means working with local governments to get exceptions to preservation laws. (“There’s a very good reason why people usually aren’t allowed to hunt on coral reefs,” Chavda says.)
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Considering how quickly invading lionfish can take over a new reef, haphazard, broad-focused hunting tends not to make a difference, Salatino says, comparing it to “weeding every fortieth weed.” Instead, Inversa encourages the communities it works with to focus on what it calls “management zones,” which divers can return to and comb over again and again. “There’s a replenish rate,” Chavda adds. “You remove them on Monday, and then you have to come back in two or three months.”A single hunter might snare 15 fish on a slow day or 70 if they find an especially hot lionfish spot. Inversa collects the take every week from docks in Nassau and South Florida. At a processing center in Tampa, a staffer skins the fish by hand, carefully removing the venomous spines. The meat goes to restaurants, and the skin is shipped to Inversa’s tanning facilities in Ohio. Everything else gets ground up for fish oil or bait.
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<img alt="two hands stretch a triangle of bright blue, scaly leather. A piece of black leather is in the background" class="richtext-image full-width" src="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/media/images/LiofishLeather.width-990.jpg"/>
<figcaption>A piece of Inversa's lionfish leather. Image courtesy of Inversa Leathers
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In Ohio, the lionfish skins undergo an intricate, 52-step tanning process. They’re bathed and rebathed in various solutions, with names like “deliming” and “pickling,” which manipulate their pH level. This process allows tanners to target the fibers of the fish skin, opening up the network of collagen that keeps the skin together, helping a chemical “tanning agent” bind to that network, and then locking it together again. The result is that the “overall structure of the skin is reinforced,” Salatino explains. “The oils and fats and all those bits get taken out. You’re left with the strong, reinforced leather.” The end result: handbags, wallets, belts, and sneakers with that distinctive scaly pattern, sold by exotic leather companies that otherwise might focus on shark, bison, or stingray.From the start, Inversa leathers have been in high demand. “We’ve never not had a backlog,” Chavda says. They purchased hundreds of fish per week this past year from individual hunters and fishing collectives, the biggest two-day haul topping 7,000 fish. And they recently purchased new tanning drums that can handle seven times their previous maximum material.Those drums won’t just hold lionfish. Inversa recently began expanding into other invasive species, including the pythons that have a literal chokehold on Florida’s Everglades. “They kill 99% of small mammalian life,” Chavda says. “There used to be otters around, squirrels, bunnies, songbirds, alligators.” The irony, he points out, is that python skin leather is actually in demand in parts of the world where the snakes are native and close to endangered. He and Salatino keep a running list of some 4,000 invasive species that Inversa might someday turn into products. Much like the lionfish, “We’d like to stop using the python where they’re becoming more and more endangered, instead using them from the areas where they’re actually decimating our life,” Salatino says. One handbag at a time.
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Venomous lionfish are taking over the Caribbean and the Mediterranean Sea, eating everything in their paths. One solution: handbags and belts.

Sharks Are Showing Up Earlier—and Staying Longer

Tiger sharks are showing up off the coast of New England earlier. What’s going on?
Tiger sharks are being spotted off the coast of the New England earlier than usual, and they’re hanging around for longer. What&#x27;s going on? And are they here to stay.
Sharks Are Showing Up Earlier—and Staying LongerPublished September 29, 2022Narrator: Sharks are turning up at U.S. beaches farther north sooner and staying for longer, ditching their usual hangouts for cooler waters.Michelle Jewell: Now, when white sharks and other sharks like bulls and tigers are moving further north, it&#x27;s less exploratory and more we&#x27;re going here to hang out for a while. So it&#x27;s an incredible change.Narrator: Experts say that historically, many sharks are pretty predictable in their migration patterns.Sora Kim: Most sharks, they have sort of like this set course and this set pattern of like where they go, when they go. Once they&#x27;re sort of adults, they sort of go back and forth between these places.Narrator: Tiger sharks typically spend the winter in tropical waters around Florida and The Bahamas, but travel north in the summer seeking cooler temperatures. But these days, their summer vacations are starting sooner.Neil Hammerschlag: About for every one degree Celsius above the long term average, we see sharks, our tiger sharks, extending their movements about 250 miles further north. And off like the northeast, like off of like New England, they are starting to come there about two weeks earlier. That has been a big change.Narrator: The water off the U.S. northeastern coast has historically been too cold for tiger sharks to comfortably thrive there. The average sea surface temperature of the Earth&#x27;s oceans has increased steadily, about 0.14 degrees Fahrenheit per decade from 1901 to 2020. And the Gulf of Maine is one of the fastest warming bodies of water in the world, averaging a record high sea surface temp of 59.9 degrees Fahrenheit in the fall of 2021, more than four degrees more than the long term average. This temperature shift might mean tiger sharks that prefer tropical water temps could start to move in.Neil Hammerschlag: I think tiger sharks to some degree can act kind of like a canary in the coal mine because their movements are so intertwined with water temperatures.Narrator: But it&#x27;s not just tiger sharks that are affected by changes in water temperature. On the west coast, baby white sharks are being spotted unusually far north in areas like Northern Monterey Bay as a result of a heat wave in 2014. Warmer water temperatures are motivating tiger and great white sharks as well as bull sharks to move to different areas for a couple of reasons. One, is most sharks are considered cold blooded. Their body temperature matches that of their environment. If waters get too warm, they&#x27;ll seek out cooler spots. Another reason is that what sharks eat is moving. As temperatures get too hot for prey to thrive, they move out, and their predators follow. When apex predators like sharks who are at the top of their food chains move into an area, it directly affects the prey already living there.Michelle Jewell: If you&#x27;re a striped bass and you&#x27;re in an area that suddenly sharks start coming through, you&#x27;re probably gonna leave that area or you&#x27;re gonna change what time of day you go to those areas to try and avoid that predator, and that can have a huge impact on an ecosystem. So there&#x27;s potential that sharks are putting in a new predation pressure into these systems that they haven&#x27;t seen before and it&#x27;ll take time for them to adjust to it as well.Narrator: Since 1970, the global population of oceanic sharks and rays has decreased by more than 70%, a dramatic decline bringing some species to the brink of extinction. One study found overfishing to be the main driver of the decline. And these new ventures also put sharks in danger, drawing them away from parts of the ocean that are protected from fishing and interference like mining or drilling.Sora Kim: They&#x27;ll probably have to deal with human encounters more, both in terms of humans being scared, but more importantly of them getting fished or killed advertently and inadvertently.Narrator: And as ocean temperatures continue to trend upwards...Michelle Jewell: Sharks, fish, the plants, the birds, everything that relies on the ocean is sensitive to those temperature changes and they all have thresholds.Narrator:These changes in shark migration tell us that even small changes in temp can have a major impact on life in the ocean, and that we&#x27;re only just starting to see the effects of those changes and fluctuations and patterns that are likely just beginning.

Tiger sharks are showing up off the coast of New England earlier. What’s going on?

A gray koala clinging to a vertical branch, looking at the camera

The idea that animal fingerprints could disrupt crime scenes had come up even before koalas' prints came to light. In 1975, London police fingerprinted several chimpanzees from local zoos as part of a push to address unsolved crimes. Image Credit: Michael Siward, Getty Images

Koalas have fingerprints almost identical to ours

In the mid-1990s, Maciej Henneberg was working with koalas at a wildlife park near Adelaide, Australia, when he noticed something strange: The animals appeared to have fingerprints.As a biological anthropologist and forensic scientist, Henneberg knew this made koalas unique, the only non-primates with fingerprints. "It appears that no one has bothered to study them in detail," he <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/koalas-make-a-monkey-out-of-the-police-1313275.html">told The Independent</a> in 1996, shortly before publishing a <a href="https://drmc.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/5433">journal article</a> announcing the find. Henneberg’s research indicated that not even careful analysis under a microscope could help distinguish the loopy, whirling ridges on koalas' fingers from our own. The fingerprints were so similar to humans’ that he worried they could easily be mixed up by detectives. (Even so, he acknowledged to The Independent, "it is extremely unlikely that koala prints would be found at the scene of a crime.”)
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While Henneberg’s discovery didn’t help crack any koala cold cases, it did add fuel to a decades-long debate about what fingerprints are for and how humans evolved to possess them. When it comes to fingerprints, we know more about how we develop them than why. Scientists divide the intricate swirl of these one-of-a-kind patterns into larger categories: loops, whorls, and arches. They call the rest of the shapes—places where the lines break, divide in two, or create concentric islands—“minutiae.” While the general gist of your fingerprint is something you inherit from your parents, these minutiae come from the environment you developed in as a fetus, including the makeup of amniotic fluid, how you were positioned, and what you touched in the womb. That’s why everyone has slightly different fingerprints, even identical twins.But what would make fingerprints useful from an evolutionary standpoint? Before Henneberg’s koala discovery, conventional wisdom held that fingerprints increase friction, helping humans grasp items better. However, a handful of more recent studies indicate it’s more complicated than that.In 2009, biologist Roland Ennos <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19525427/">published a study</a> suggesting that when in contact with an object, the skin on our fingertips behaves like rubber. That means friction between our skin and a surface increases in proportion to the total area in contact. And because the skin is ridged with loops, whorls, and arches, it actually makes less contact with that surface than if it were smooth, meaning that fingerprints may actually decrease friction.  But more recently, <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2001055117">a study</a> building on Ennos’ conclusions suggested that, while fingerprints may not build friction on their own, they may help maintain grip by working in conjunction with sweat glands. The researchers found that when in contact with hard, impermeable surfaces, our fingers release moisture. The moisture builds friction by softening the skin on our fingertips, with help from the prints’ tiny grooves, which direct the liquid in a way that allows maximum evaporation. (That’s important because if the sweat pools too much, it could lead to slippage.) The newly pliant skin also allows for another built-in protection, since pressing against the surface eventually blocks off the pores manufacturing the sweat, allowing evaporation to catch up and helping maintain the all-important friction. "This dual-mechanism for managing moisture has provided primates with an evolutionary advantage in dry and wet conditions–giving them manipulative and locomotive abilities not available to other animals," coauthor Mike Adams <a href="https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2020/fingerprints-moisture-regulating-mechanism-strengthens-human-touch-study">said in a press release</a> at the time. 
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And fingerprints may also provide crucial sensitivity in our fingertips. Physicists at École Normale Supérieure in Paris found that fingerprint ridges <a href="https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1166467">may amplify the vibrations</a> made by rubbing a fingertip across a rough surface, delivering those vibrations to nerve endings in our fingers. This kind of insight has become increasingly important as designers of <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/augmented/">prosthetic limbs</a>, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/electronic-glove-pressure-sensors/">adaptive technologies</a>, and touch screens seek to understand how our fingers and <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/touch-prosthetic-hand/">sense of touch</a> help us interact with the world.But our last common ancestor with koalas was, by some calculations, more than 100 million years ago, when marsupials split off from the rest of mammals. So how did we come to share this particular trait? The answer is what’s called “convergent evolution,” when unrelated organisms evolve identical characteristics in response to similar evolutionary pressures. There are only so many ways for animals to climb tall trees, live on cliffs, move around underwater, or accomplish any of the specific tasks required by narrow evolutionary niches. Bat and bird wings evolved separately. <a href="https://www.livescience.com/convergent-evolution.html">As Live Science points out</a>, sharks and dolphins come from lineages that diverged hundreds of millions of years ago, but both evolved smooth skin and sharp fins to help them chase down prey. And since marsupials branched off so long ago, there’s even a parallel track of them in Australia that have convergent-evolved with our placental mammal cousins. Marsupial moles Down Under, for example, are unrelated to moles in other parts of the world. Yet both are blind and boast feet very similarly adapted for a life digging underground. Koalas are famously picky eaters who seek out eucalyptus leaves of a specific age. And as Henneberg points out in his 1997 paper, koalas may also need to grasp in similar ways to humans, simultaneously, “climbing vertically onto the smaller branches of eucalyptus trees, reaching out, grasping handfuls of leaves and bringing them to the mouth." He felt that koala fingerprints must have originated as an adaptation to this task, and a relatively recent one, since neither wombats nor kangaroos (both koala cousins) have them. The friction and sensitivity fingerprints afford may help them simultaneously hang onto trees and do the delicate work of picking particular leaves and discarding others—but hopefully not near a crime scene. 
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Koalas are the only non-primates with fingerprints. How is that possible—and why?

How Seaweed May Help Revive Our Oceans

Kelp’s ability to capture carbon from the ocean could help save marine ecosystems.
In some parts of the ocean, like in the Gulf of Mexico, there is so little oxygen in the water that marine life is actually suffocating. Could kelp help, or is it mostly hype?
Hope or Hype? How Seaweed May Help Revive Our OceansPublished August 1, 2022Narrator: Some ocean scientists are raving about kelp.Scott: There&#x27;s a lot to like about kelp, particularly in its ecosystems benefits.Narrator: Because they think this seaweed can potentially help solve major problems in our oceans today, including dead zones, areas of the ocean where oxygen levels have dropped, killing off all kinds of sea life.Francis: Oxygen&#x27;s just declining so low that fish, other invertebrates, they actually suffocate.Narrator: So, why is this happening? In many cases, it starts with nitrogen and phosphorus, often found in fertilizer, the stuff we use for agriculture, or even our lawns or gardens. Rainwater washes it into streams and rivers and it makes its way into the ocean.Francis: If there&#x27;s too much nutrients that run down from watersheds into a bay, for example, it stimulates these phytoplankton blooms.Narrator: Phytoplankton are single-celled algae. And these blooms can grow out of control, sometimes even visible from space, choking off oxygen from the water and blocking sunlight to the plants below. Eventually the phytoplankton die and they sink.Francis: Even though they&#x27;re really small, when they sink, they decompose, and in that decomposition process, bacteria will use up the oxygen that&#x27;s near the sea floor.Narrator: In many cases, this process is what causes the loss of oxygen in the water. And that&#x27;s what happened in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi empties here, bringing high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus into the Gulf. This is where kelp comes in.Scott: So we started creating this little miniature farm here. One of the great attributes of of seaweeds is it&#x27;s a potent way of absorbing all these luxurious nutrients that&#x27;s far too much for the ocean to really fully absorb.Narrator: In addition, it also is great at capturing carbon at rates 50 times higher than trees on land.Scott: Carbon sequestration is one of the key goals for climate change that we need to address. So there&#x27;s a lot of interest in growing seaweeds simply for sucking carbon and nitrogen out of the waters and putting them into a more stable form.Narrator: But to make an impact, you need a lot of kelp sucking up nutrients and it would take a decent amount of space in the ocean to grow it all.Scott: When you look at it on a map in congregate, it would be about as big as Iowa, but spread out all along the shoreline. And I&#x27;d say we&#x27;re still at that level of trying to distinguish between what&#x27;s real and what&#x27;s possible.Scott: So I&#x27;ve marked the perimeter of the farm with farm buoys. You can see ones over there.Narrator: And then you need to harvest it to prevent it from dying and releasing all of the absorbed nitrogen and phosphorus back into the water.Scott: That&#x27;s some good looking kelp!Narrator: And for farmers to want to grow this much kelp, they&#x27;d need a market to sell it, and the market for kelp in the US is still emerging.Scott: It&#x27;s interesting that when we have more complex food systems, we don&#x27;t value traditional foods.Narrator: Seaweed also has an important cultural significance. Some indigenous communities in the US have been harvesting it for centuries, like in Hawaii, where seaweed is known as limu.Scott: Limu traditionally has been used in our practices in the way we live, not just in our eating.Narrator: And the prospect of large scale production raises a red flag for some.Scott: There&#x27;s concerns in the community about mass producing limu. We&#x27;ve had a lot of history where people have come in from outside of Hawaii and they&#x27;ve done these different types of activities but they&#x27;re not really giving back to the communities here. That&#x27;s one of the questions I always think, how is this helping my community?Narrator: And if we grew huge quantities of kelp for carbon capture, what would we do with it all? Some scientists are exploring the possibility of sinking kelp deep down into the ocean, several thousand feet below the surface, potentially sequestering the carbon for millions of years but there are still a lot of unknowns.Scott: What does happen to that carbon and the seaweed when it goes to 1,000 meters deep? It&#x27;s not like it&#x27;s a complete desert down there. There are still organisms growing. Is that a free lunch for somebody? Are we gonna have a great bloom of something else and some unintended consequences? We need to precede doing those grand ideas with experiments to see what the impact might be.

Kelp’s ability to capture carbon from the ocean could help save marine ecosystems.

Ocean Invaders

Meet one of the ocean’s most beautiful and destructive species: Lionfish.

Topic: Nature

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