this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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As a child, the ocean fascinated me. I wanted to learn everything I could. As I got older, and the world got worse, the things I learned grew more and more terrifying, until I eventually stopped trying to learn more because it was just too depressing.
I don't know how Marine Biologists and Oceanographers do it. To be surrounded every day with thousands of indicators and unquestionable data that all shows our oceans are fucked. And from hundreds of different ways too; it doesn't even matter if you somehow fix global warming, there are so many other issues remaining that it's still all fucked. It's like if a guy walked into a hospital with every disease. Where the hell do you even start?
A friend of mine dedicated his life to birds and wildlife. He spent six months in Argentina weighing and banding penguins, worked to design autonomous buoys that track ocean data, and his personal birdwatching species count was over, 10k.
He passed away suddenly last March at the age of 33. He just got married the month before.
As tragic as his death was (especially for his widow), part of me thinks that there was some mercy in him dying so young rather than potentially living a long life of watching everything he cared about and worked to save get destroyed.
This is a sort of "but it's weird that it happened twice" thing, but I had a friend out researching Orangutans in I think Indonesia and he dropped dead after (supposedly) recovering from a fever.
Probably only a few years younger than your friend.
I've not kept up with his research but I suspect the species is almost certainly declining worse than when he was there.
Not sure what I'm saying, but yeah.
Weird that it happened twice.
Yeah in this case, he dropped dead in a university lab. Nobody else was with him. Fucker was a marathon runner. Nobody knows what happened, but nobody suspects foul play.
My first degree is in oceanography. I didn't make a career of it - went on to study other fields.
It's really difficult, and hits you in unexpected places. For example, watching avatar 2 broke me emotionally during the whale hunting scenes.
There's a real sense of powerlessness with respect to the health of the ocean.