It has been a busy few days for us at OSPAR. So far the meetings we’ve assisted have been incredibly interesting, but the entire process is exhausting and rather intense: we’ve been getting back to our hotel at around 23h and waking up very early in the morning to prepare for meetings. The delegates look more exhausted than we do - no doubt because their negotiations have been going on into the wee hours of the morning.

Today marks the beginning of the OSPAR Commission meeting in Bergen, Norway.

In case you are wondering what this actually is, we thought we’d give you a bit of background on the Commission and what it is that they do.

OSPAR is the result of the 1992 unification of two international Conventions related to the protection of marine environment: the Oslo convention adopted in 1972 which regulates dumping waste at sea and the Paris Convention, adopted two years later and focusing on land based sources of pollution.

If you’ve been keeping up with the ship's log, you'll notice that these past two weeks have been as equally intense as the others. The departure of Oceana workers from Alaska and Washington and their hydrocarbon sensors was immediately compensated by the arrival of a new group of Spanish divers and the underwater robot (ROV) to Gulfport, Mississippi. Then we begin a new phase of the expedition: the visual exploration of the seabeds in the areas whose surface waters had been covered by oil for weeks.

A lot of people often ask what they can do to learn about the state of the oceans – there is so much information out there, it can certainly be a daunting task to sort through it all.

That’s why we decided to pull together some of our favorite books and movies on marine issues. This list is by no means an exhaustive one, its just a couple of ideas to help get you on track.

­For the Bookworm:

Climate change has been connected to some of the biggest natural disasters of the past few years – the flooding in Pakistan, the destructive hurricanes slamming the US coasts, wild fires wiping out swaths of forests, crop failures around the world, etc. But one of climate change’s most devastating side effects is rarely talked about: Ocean Acidification.