Reaping the offshore wind.

The School of Marine Sciences welcomes you to our site and encourages you to join our mission: to develop scientific understanding of the marine environment that is Maine’s heritage, to integrate and communicate that knowledge through interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate studies, and to apply it toward stewardship of sustainable marine resources. Our backyard, the Gulf of Maine, is the cradle of North American marine sciences, where the systems thinking of Henry Bryant Bigelow converged on the biological diversity explored by pioneers such as William Stimson, Louis and Alexander Agassiz and Addison Emery Verrill and later melded with the Hutchinsonian tradition of quantitative ecosystem analysis in the works of Gordon Riley.

Times, methods and environments have changed.  The School of Marine Sciences is the intellectual home of the Gulf of Maine array in NERACOOS (Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems).  Formerly known as GoMOOS (Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System), this buoy array was designed and built by the School of Marine Sciences' Physical Oceanography Group (PhOG), who also quality control and produce the 24/7 data return, nowcasts and forecasts for the Gulf of Maine and deliver them to NERACOOS.   PhOG takes pride in operating the nation's first 24/7 coastal observing array with > 90% data return since its inception in 2001.  Our other approaches to the oceans also have changed.  We in SMS measure diversity genomically as well as with classic taxonomic keys. We observe with scientific diving methods, satellites, ships, buoys, floats, gliders, AUVs and cabled instruments.  We synthesize with real-time, assimilative models. We test many of our methods and ideas at modest scale in the laboratory or in the ocean at marine facilities like the Darling Marine Center and the Center for Cooperative Aquaculture Research. With these innovations, we sustain the pioneers' passion for both scholarship and integration of marine sciences across the waterfront and all the depths beyond. Our faculty is well known for its research over a broad spectrum of marine studies from molecular biology and biotechnology to fisheries science, fisheries economics and anthropology, and from marine geology and coastal engineering to shellfish and finfish aquaculture, marine ecology and most aspects of oceanography. We don't stop with science; we include policy that uses it intelligently.  Many of us are involved in various ways with marine spatial planning and approaches to ecosystem-based management. With our partner, the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), we are active in the region through regional associations, notably NOAA's Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR) and the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS).  In fall 2010 we will push the limits of interdisciplinary integration further, through a new, case study- and web-based approach to graduate-level learning that will replace our classic introductory curriculum.

Marine sciences have entered an era of new problems and new solutions to old problems.  With seven billion people on the planet, environmental and social issues are connected as never before, and it makes less and less sense to study them independently. Climate change and ocean acidification threaten Maine's and humankind's ocean heritage. Climate change itself cannot be understood without attention to the oceans, which store vastly more heat than can the more rarified atmosphere.  Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy eyed tidal power in Maine. Their visions are being realized in modified form in the waters of Cobscook Bay in Barack H. Obama's first term. Vast offshore wind resources will be harvested off Maine's coast within a decade.  The School of Marine Sciences is a vital participant in the UMaine-led DeepCwind Consortium that is building the Department of Energy's first and only test bed for offshore wind generation — off Monhegan Island. Micro- and macroalgae will be grown for biofuels and nutraceuticals.  Our educational programs are integrated and aimed. If you want to participate both in this future and in the sound policy needed to manage it, you have come to the right place.