Ticketed

Essential Information

Type Talks and tours
Location
Date and Times Monday 21 July 2025 l 6.30pm
Prices Adult: £12

Free for Members. Not a member? Join now

All of the Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight – a blue machine.

Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told – that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history and culture.

Join physicist Dr Helen Czerski, author of Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World, on a deep dive to illuminate the murky depths of the ocean. In this talk, Helen will examine the messengers, passengers and voyagers that live in it, travel over it and survive because of it. 

Discover, too, the vast currents, invisible ocean walls and underwater waterfalls that all have their place in the ocean's complex, interlinked system.

Image
A portrait photograph of scientist and broadcaster Helen Czerski

About the speaker

Dr Helen Czerski is an Associate Professor at University College London, and also a broadcaster and writer. Her research topic is the physics of breaking waves and bubbles in the open ocean, and how these bubbles influence the transfer of gases between the atmosphere and the ocean. She has spent months working on research ships in the Antarctic, the Pacific, the North Atlantic and the Arctic, and is an experienced field scientist.

Since 2011, Helen has presented a wide range of science documentaries for the BBC on the physics of everyday life, atmospheric and ocean science.  She received the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal from the Institute of Physics for her work on communicating physics to a wider audience. Helen is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, has been awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the British Science Association and was one of the 2020 Royal Institution Christmas Lecturers. She is a trustee of Royal Museums Greenwich. 

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Banner image: courtesy of Kurt Arrigo/Ocean Image Bank