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What I learned this week:

That, when New Zealand was covered with ocean, there were 1.5-meter tall penguins swimming around. That they've found fossils of amphibious whales the size of sheep in the Himalayas.

That fjords are an estuarine ecosystem, but because they're protected from wave action, instead of mixing the layers of fresh and salt water remain distinct, which can effectively trap marine organisms in the fjord, making them biological islands.

That the dolphins in New Zealand's fjords are some of the only ones in the world who rely on fish nurtured in kelp beds for their diets; they found this out by isotope-tracking bits of the dolphin's skin to determine where they get their carbon from.

That there's a giant prehistoric turtle named after Terry Pratchett (Terrypratchetti, as I understand).

That a researcher on sabbatical who travelled from Montana to Japan to Oslo was able to see the results of diet changes in the isotopic content of his beard hairs.

That there's a species bivalve, Solemya, with no gut or digestive system, that obtains its nutrients from chemioautotrophic bacteria that live inside of it.

That all sorts of things that are unacceptable on land--dumping and dredging and on and on--are acceptable in the oceans. Which is something I already knew, but makes me wonder: if we drained them, what would we see? If we had to walk past the great mass of waste floating in the Pacific every day, and if the oceans were considered wilderness the same way we consider the rainforests, or mountain ranges wilderness, would we accept it so easily?