If you’re looking for good educational content for your new homeschooling curriculum, local celebrity news, or reassurance that some good comes out of every challenge, I offer you this! Nicola Jones’ TED talk!

Her talk, on ocean noise pollution, was presented at the end of last year and is now online. I can’t help but hope that our “pandemic pause” has also quieted all that ocean traffic, and the whales are loving it.

The ocean is a naturally noisy place full of singing whales, grunting fish, snapping shrimp, cracking ice, wind and rain. But human-made sounds — from ship engines to oil drilling — have become an acute threat to marine life, says science journalist Nicola Jones. Watch (and listen) as she discusses the strange things that happen to underwater creatures in the face of ocean noise pollution — and shares straightforward ways we can dial down the sound to see almost immediate impacts.

<div style=”max-width:854px”><div style=”position:relative;height:0;padding-bottom:56.25%”>https://embed.ted.com/talks/lang/en/nicola_jones_the_dangers_of_a_noisy_ocean_and_how_we_can_quiet_it_down</div></div>