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Building a Better Dispersant: When we wash dishes at home, we use dish soap to break up and wash away any oil that is stuck to our plates and utensils. Similarly, stronger soap-like chemicals called dispersants can be used to break up oil spills, like thos
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Building a Better Dispersant

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A pair of French Angelfish (Pomacanthus paru) swim off the coast of Brazil.
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Pair of Angelfish

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Large organisms, like these tunicates, live inside the recesses of a ship's hull while microscopic organisms form a film across all the painted surfaces on the boat.
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Tunicates On Hull of Boat

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Blue Crab walking in wet sand.
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Blue Crab On The Gulf Coast

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Graduate students Danielle Young from Temple University and Dannise Ruiz from Penn State preparing oil and dispersant solutions for exposure experiments with deep sea corals aboard the exploration vessel E/V Nautilus.
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Testing Impacts of Dispersants

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A close-up look of the seaside sparrow.
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A Close-up of a Seaside Sparrow

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A stormy sea lashes the village of Shismaref, Alaska, where the coastline has eroded 30–90 m (100–300 ft) in the past 30 years.
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Shismaref, Alaska

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A view of McMurdo Station with a frozen Ross Sea in the background.
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McMurdo Station

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Model of a lion’s mane jellyfish on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. This jellyfish, a member of the phylum Cnidaria, can have tentacles up to 190 feet long (58 meters) and a bell almost 7 feet (2 meters) in diameter.
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Lion's Mane Jellyfish in Sant Ocean Hall

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A healthy, deep sea octocoral and their brittle star partners
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Brittle stars and their best friends the octocorals

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Epaulette shark
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Epaulette Shark

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Scientists use satellite images of the ocean to estimate chlorophyll concentrations in the water. You can see the yellow swirls of phytoplankton concentrated at the sea surface in this image.
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Satellite Image of Chlorophyll Concentration

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