Best Of MetaFilter

Deepwater Horizon in flames after the explosion, via Wikipedia

My first hitch as a licensed guy, we get mayday calls. Deepwater Horizon. 33 nm east. Mayday. In a great comment, HVACDC_Bag reflects on working on spill response vessels in the Honda Point Disaster thread.

Dreyfusfinucane talks about sea ice and salt and how they affect the temperature of the ocean within climate change.

An iceberg floats in Disko Bay, near Ilulissat, Greenland, on July 24, 2015. The massive Greenland ice sheet is shedding about 300 gigatons of ice a year into the ocean, making it the single largest source of sea level rise from melting ice. Credits: NASA/Saskia Madlener

via BBC.com

Fizz posted Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before, the first full-sized digital scan of the Titanic, with visualizations pieced together from 700,000 images collected by remote controlled submersibles. (Title via pthomas745 in the comments!)

DSCN3846edit by jon pratty (cc by)

"Shoots you down in a lifeboat, in choppy water, at night, on Easter.": I'd like some insight as to why this sign would be on a state supervisor and an office manager's door to their shared office. Mysterious! But Ask Mefi answerers come through!

Storm Surge by Krystal.Hamlin (cc by)

In Ask Metafilter, cda is looking for the best products that smell like the ocean

Hohonu Moana: Exploring Deep Waters off Hawaiʻi by NOAA Ocean Exploration & Research (cc by-sa)

More people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone.

Dive into motty's post of Neal Agarwal's awesome deep sea scroller to view unfathomable mysteries of the vasty depths, meter by meter

李子柒 Handmade oven

In case you missed them, see the Mahlongwa River breach as a tiny trickle turns into a raging torrent; watch a short, quiet, idyllic video of Li Zikai building a cat-shaped brick-and-clay oven from scratch; read the secrets of a diary written on castle floorboards; view a compendium of four short films about a Kyoto dye workshop that creates a range of rare and beautiful colors solely with plants and other natural materials.

Seafloor Surveys After Katrina by NOAA Images

bassomatic says, "my dad and his team of underwater archaeologists were the first to find an ancient shipwreck using side-scan sonar..."

Scary stories and freaky facts about oxygen deprivation at altitude

How does a scuba diver smell shipwreck cheese underwater? And some other ancient foods, eaten in the name of science

AskMe offers some resources on cloudwatching for beginners

Moby Dick is fabulous - Mefites talk Melville and subtext, and what you thought of classic novels before you read them, and the linked writer drops by to respond

Submersible finds glowy purple orb in the depths

And finally, that pressing question, what if I fell out of an airplane in a tank full of water?

Stirring Up a Bloom off Patagonia by NASA Goddard Photo and Video (cc by)

Will it snowball? Arguable. There are plentiful arguments about the mode of evolution and lots of controversy. There's one school that says ecologies are robust within certain limits - past those limits and things fall apart. There are others that argue for a more dynamic view, where is set off-balance the system could rapidly change until it finds a new equilibria.