The University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science and the Ocean Research and Education Foundation have announced the roster of distinguished scientists and explorers who will speak in the 2011 Sea Secrets lecture series. The events, which are free and open to the public, are designed to provide insight and information about the oceans, which cover two-thirds of our planet and much of which are still an enigma. The lectures take place in the Rosenstiel School Auditorium, 4600 Rickenbacker Causeway on Virginia Key, beginning with a reception at 5:30 p.m. and followed by the lecture at 6 p.m.

Sponsored by The Shepard Broad Foundation, The Charles N. and Eleanor Knight Leigh Foundation, and Southern Wine and Spirits and organized by UM Professor Emeritus Robert N. Ginsburg, Sea Secrets is designed for the South Florida non-scientific community. The following is the schedule for Sea Secrets in 2011:

Wednesday, January 19
The Extraordinary and Embattled Sperm Whale (and how it got its weird name)
Sperm whales have been a mystery to humans since even before Melville’s Moby Dick. Prominent conservationist Richard Ellis, widely recognized as both author and foremost painter of marine subjects in the world, will open this year’s lecture series with a discussion on these remarkable animals. Ellis, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, is the author of more than a dozen books on wildlife topics ranging from tuna to the endangered polar bear. He is a special adviser to the American Cetacean Society and an Explorers Club member, and from 1980-1990 he was a member of the International Whaling Commission. The lecture will combine his artistic aptitude with penetrating insights into the natural history of the amazing sperm whale.

Wednesday, February 16
The Secret Crisis of the Global Ocean
Just how sick are our oceans? Hear the answer from journalist and author Alana Mitchell, whose second book, Sea Sick: The Hidden Crisis in the Global Ocean, won last year’s prestigious Grantham Prize for Excellence in Reporting on the Environment. As a journalist with the Canadian Globe and Mail, she specialized on the environment and was widely recognized for her incisive reporting on the vanishing forests of Madagascar. To assess the health of our oceans she traveled the planet interviewing scientists and fisheries managers to discover what plans are underway and what the social and political challenges are to developing a plan to sustain marine resources. The World Conservation Union and the Reuters Foundation named Mitchell the world’s best environmental journalist of 2000.

Wednesday, March 16
Fantasy to Reality: Human Presence in the Deep Ocean
In the famous novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne expressed what many had dreamed: the ability to visit and explore the unknown depths of the ocean. For more than four decades, the leader in ocean floor exploration has been the deep submergence vehicle ALVIN, based at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Chief Pilot Bruce Strickrott has conducted 308 dives to hydrothermal vents, cold seep communities, undersea volcanoes, seamounts, and mid-ocean ridges around the globe. He will share what it is like to spend eight hours or more peering through ALVIN’s viewports, using robotic ‘hands’ or manipulators to sample animals and sea floor deposits, and from time to time having those eureka moments of unexpected discovery.

Wednesday, April 20
‘Blue Holes’ on the Blue Planet
Absolute darkness, dramatic reversing currents, extreme depths, poisonous gasses, tight squeezes. These are just some of the challenges that make ‘blue holes’ or sink holes under the sea, one of the least understood extreme ecosystems on the planet. Last year National Geographic Emerging Explorer Kenny Broad, director of UM’s Leonard and Jayne Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy, designed an expedition to the Bahamas that included more than 150 dives and involved unique collaboration between cave divers, scientists, and a specialized film team from the National Geographic Society. Come to hear about the unknown microbes and bones of extinct animals they discovered, and see images of how they squirmed through the labyrinthine passages.

Wednesday, May 18
Of Ice, Antarctica, and Ammonites: Saving South Florida
Nothing may be more critical to Floridians than knowing if sea level rise will flood our shores. Some key answers may come from thousands of miles away, in Antarctica. There, teams of geologists and paleontologists led by Peter Ward, professor of paleontology at the University of Washington, are exploring 60 million-year-old rocks for fossil evidence of ice sheets. Using ammonites, ancient relatives of the chambered nautilus, they are hoping to establish whether ice sheets existed back then. At that time, atmospheric carbon dioxide topped 1,000 parts per million, or about three times present levels, and ice sheets remained intact. If there were indeed ice sheets under such high carbon dioxide and there was limited sea level rise, perhaps we are not in as much danger as we thought—at least in the short term.