![[Currents header graphic]](/homeart/currents_header.gif)
September 15, 1997
By Robert Irion
Do you know what squid eat for breakfast? Where the Sargasso Sea is? How to calculate your longitude in the middle of the ocean? Even if you do, you might enjoy watching the action as UCSC hosts a regional competition of the first National Ocean Sciences Bowl.
Teams of high school students from central and northern California will converge on UCSC next February for the competition, sponsored by the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education. UCSC will be one of 16 sites for the regional academic battles. Winning teams will advance to the national finals in Washington, D.C., in April 1998.
Dorris Welch, director of public education at UCSC's Long Marine Lab, will organize the event. She hopes to attract between 16 and 30 teams of juniors and seniors to the competition, which is modeled after the seven-year-old National Science Bowl.
UCSC's selection as a regional site, Welch said, puts the campus into fine company. Other West Coast sites include the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Oregon State University, the University of Washington, and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Most other host universities are strung along the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.
Welch added that the contest will help draw attention to Long Marine Lab's education programs for schoolchildren, which are unusually extensive for a leading marine research institution.
"This fits very nicely into two of our important goals," Welch said. "One is to work toward inspiring a future generation of marine scientists. The other, longer-term goal is to reach out to a broader audience of high school students and teachers to get them more involved in our programs." Welch and her Long Marine Lab colleagues will make a special effort to solicit teams from high schools in the Monterey Bay Area, she noted.
Each participating school will send a team of four students and one alternate to the competition. The teams will tackle multiple-choice and short-answer questions being developed by a national panel of marine educators, including Welch. The panel will draw their questions from the scientific and technical disciplines used in studying the oceans, such as physics, chemistry, geology, biology, and atmospheric science. Other questions will concern the role of the oceans in economics, history, and culture.
Schools will have the option of incorporating training for the National Ocean Sciences Bowl into their regular science curricula or establishing special after-school groups for their teams, Welch said. The ultimate goal is to increase public visibility and understanding of the national investment in ocean-related research.
The February competition at UCSC will be open to the public. Welch will announce the date and location later this fall.