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The BiG Scuba Podcast… with Christine Dennison

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Next in a new series of podcasts shared by our friends Gemma and Ian aka The BiG Scuba Podcast…

Christine Dennison

Ian and Gemma chat to Christine Dennison.  She aims to empower women through exploration, adventure and role models. “Quest for knowledge, Thirst for Adventure” is a great motto. Christine is the Co-founder and President of Mad Dog Expeditions, an internationally-recognized technical scuba diving and exploration company based in New York City. For more than 20 years Christine has been diving and exploring in remote regions of the world. Among her accomplishments, Christine is the first woman to dive and explore beneath the Arctic Sea ice and ice caves of the Canadian High Arctic.

To date Christine has logged over 80 dives in this harsh polar environment.  She is also the first woman to dive the dangerous piranha-saturated waters of the Amazon’s Rio Negro and its tributaries. Her additional diving expertise includes technical mixed gas wreck diving of historic shipwrecks around the world including the scuttled WW1 German Fleet of Scapa Flow in the Scottish Isles, and the Bianca C, a luxury liner and the deepest wreck in the Caribbean.

Christine is an experienced technical Divemaster and mixed gas diver with cave, wreck and ice certifications. Her expertise in operations and logistics of remote regions has been invaluable in consulting, organizing and leading expeditions for numerous film crews and scientific teams throughout the world. Her experience extends into working with advanced underwater ROV technology as a pilot and camera operator with over three years of ongoing exploration and documentary expeditions to the WW2 US R12 submarine in the Gulf of Mexico.

Christine is very active in oceanographic and wildlife conservation issues surrounding indigenous peoples. She is a role model for young women everywhere and passes on her expertise by mentoring, lecturing and presenting to student groups throughout the country. She is an ardent traveler and explorer spanning more than 30 countries. An International Baccalaureate graduate of New York’s Anglo-American School and University student in English Literature and Art History, Christine is Spanish and bi-lingual as well as conversational French. She was inducted as a Fellow of both the prestigious Explorers Club in New York and the Royal Geographical Society in London. She serves on the Board of several nonprofit organizations that promote education, exploration, Ocean Outreach and animal rescue and takes her adopted Husky Ava on expeditions with her whenever she can.

Find out more about Christine at:


Find more podcast episodes and information at www.thebigscuba.com and on most social platforms @thebigscuba

The BiG Scuba Podcast is a UK based podcast, discussing everything to do with diving, other underwater and on the water activities and the ocean. Our hope is to promote scuba diving to more people including women. Ian Last and Gemma Kemp are the “I” and the “G” of The BiG Scuba Podcast. Ian is a PADI Divemaster, with about 300 dives from diving in the UK, Mexico and Red Sea. He works with our local PADI Dive Centre in Norwich, Norfolk and also teaches in the water. Gemma Kemp is a very positive person and makes a good ambassador for new women divers in the sport of scuba. Gemma began her scuba journey in January and continued studying through lockdown and then got some experience in our local rivers snorkelling. Gemma completed her PADI Open Water qualification in July 2020 and now has completed just short of 20 dives. We actively encourage interaction with our listeners and have a Patron page so that anyone with an interest in scuba diving can have a voice at The BiG Scuba Podcast. Take your first breaths with The BiG Scuba at thebigscubapodcast.com

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The Ocean Cleanup Launches 30 Cities Program to Cut Ocean Plastic Pollution from Rivers by One Third by 2030

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The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup, the international non-profit with the mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, has announced, at the UN Ocean Conference (UNOC), its plan to rapidly expand its work to intercept and remove ocean-bound plastic pollution.

The 30 Cities Program will scale the organization’s proven Interceptor™ solutions across 30 key cities in Asia and the Americas, aiming to eliminate up to one third of all plastic flowing from the world’s rivers into the ocean before the end of the decade.

This evolution follows five years of learning through pioneering deployments across 20 of the world’s most polluting rivers and represents a key next step in the organization’s mission and the global fight against ocean plastic pollution.

The Ocean Cleanup

With the 30 Cities Program, The Ocean Cleanup will transition from single river deployments to citywide solutions, tackling the main plastic emitting waterways within each selected city. This follows a key learning from deployments in Kingston, Jamaica, which showed it is possible to scale faster when projects encompass whole cities, as the same set of partners can be involved with all deployments.

To date, The Ocean Cleanup has already prevented 29 million kilograms of trash from reaching the ocean. The organization currently intercepts an estimated 1–3 percent of global river-borne plastic emissions. With the first 20 river deployments close to being fully operational, it is now poised to reduce the plastic pollution flowing into the ocean from rivers by up to a third.

“When we take on an entire city, instead of individual rivers, we can scale faster, reduce costs, and maximize impact,” said Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. “Our analysis shows that strategically deploying Interceptors across just 30 carefully chosen cities can stop up to a third of river plastic pollution worldwide. This is the next big leap toward our ultimate goal of a 90  percent reduction in global ocean plastic pollution.”

City-by-city: a Faster Path to Scaling

Using the latest scientific modeling and on the ground experience, The Ocean Cleanup identified 30 major plastic polluting coastal cities which include:

Panama City, Panama – First deployment to go live in the coming months.
Mumbai, India – Mapping of all waterways completed; preparations for first deployments underway.

Furthermore, the organization is developing plans to expand on its existing work to all polluting rivers in:

• Manila, Philippines; Montego Bay, Jamaica; Jakarta, Indonesia; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Bangkok, Thailand and Los Angeles, U.S.A.

Other cities will be announced once the necessary partnerships and agreements are in place. Planning and fundraising activities are underway for all 30 cities. To realize these ambitious plans, the organization is currently also expanding its engineering and operational capacity.

Data Driven Restoration at Scale

Before Interceptors are deployed, each city project begins with an intensive analysis phase. Aerial drones, AI-powered image analysis, and GPS-tagged “dummy” plastics are used to chart every visible waterway and track how waste moves from streets to sea. These real-time insights guide optimal Interceptor placement and provide a public baseline against which progress can be measured.

Alongside intercepting new plastic, the 30 Cities Program will also remove debris from nearby coasts, mangroves, and coral reefs. This twin-track approach—shutting off the tap while clearing the legacy pollution—enables The Ocean Cleanup to achieve long-term impact, which includes the restoration of fish nursery habitats, boosting coastal tourism, and strengthening of natural storm surge defenses for local communities. Alongside local partners, the organization also advocates for improvements in waste management and awareness raising amongst communities.

The Ocean Cleanup

Completing the First 20 Rivers

While laying the foundation for the 30 Cities Program, The Ocean Cleanup is also nearing completion of its first 20 river projects. The next landmark achievement—expected as soon as the second half of this year—is in the western Caribbean, where the team aims to resolve the plastic pollution problem in the Gulf of Honduras by intercepting the trash feeding into this body of water.

A Stepping Stone Toward a 90  Percent Reduction

The 30 Cities Program represents the first major scaling step in The Ocean Cleanup’s journey to eliminate 90 percent of floating ocean plastic pollution. In parallel, efforts are continuing to remove plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Whilst extraction operations are currently on hiatus, work to deploy cutting edge technologies to map the “hotspots”, or areas of intense plastic accumulation, in order to make future extractions more efficient and economical, is ongoing.

By combining river interception and coastal cleanup with its offshore cleanup systems targeting legacy pollution that’s already in the ocean, the organization is charting a path to turn off the tap and mop up the mess.

The Ocean Cleanup

About The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit organization that develops and scales technologies to rid the oceans of plastic. By conducting extensive research, engineering scalable solutions, and partnering with governments, industry, and like-minded organizations, The Ocean Cleanup is working to stop plastic inflow via rivers and remove legacy plastic already polluting the oceans. As of June 2025, the non-profit has collected over 28 million kilograms (62 million pounds) of trash from aquatic ecosystems around the world. Founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup now employs a multi-disciplined team of approximately 200 people. The organization is headquartered in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, with international operations in 10 countries. For more information, visit www.theoceancleanup.com.

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Blogs

Rescues, Rays, and Darwin the Turtle: My Trip to Biomes Marine Biology Center

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biomes

It’s time to catch up with 12-year-old Mia DaPonte, New England’s youngest ever female PADI Master Scuba Diver, in her latest blog for Scubaverse!

It’s still a little too cold to get in the water here in New England. I wish I had a drysuit! To get my ocean fix, I asked my mom to take me and my friends to the Biomes Marine Biology Center.

What is Biomes? It’s a rescue center near my house that’s home to all kinds of ocean animals—and they’re all local! It’s truly awesome to experience. There are so many cool creatures there, like skates, sharks, stingrays, horseshoe crabs, tropical fish, lobsters, seahorses, octopuses, and even some reptiles that were given up by their owners.

biomes

Darwin the turtle is always fun to watch. He’s huge and has his own home, but he also gets to wander around the place on his own when he feels like it!

They have lots of touch tanks. I got to touch sharks, turtles, and even hold a horseshoe crab! (There’s a little lip on the side of their shell where you can hold them—but don’t do this without permission! Their gills always need to stay in the water.) I also touched stingrays! They felt slimy but rough at the same time.

biomes

One of my favorite things to do is see the octopus and watch it play with the toys in its tank. I always check to see if any seahorses are pregnant and look for the babies when they’re born. The babies are kept in their own tank at first to stay safe, and then moved when they’re big enough.

We got lucky this time—there was a baby skate in a mermaid’s purse that was ready to hatch any day! It was in a special tank with a light. When you press the button, the light turns on so you can see the baby skate moving around inside the purse!

biomes

As our visit was ending, the owner, Mark, sat down with us and told us how he started Biomes. When he was 14 years old, he began rescuing sea animals. His love for the ocean started when he was young—just like mine! As he got older, he started a traveling business, bringing animals to classrooms and doing shows. Eventually, he turned it into something bigger, and now Biomes is a huge center full of rescued animals.

He told us that most of the fish and animals are rescued from fishing boats or the cold waters of New England—places where tropical fish wouldn’t survive the winter. They try to rescue babies whenever they can, so they have a better chance of adapting. Darwin the turtle actually hatched in Mark’s hand!

biomes

My mom gets a pass to Biomes every year because I love going there so much. There are always new animals to see and feedings to watch. One time, I even got to feed the octopus!

If you ever come to Rhode Island, you have to check out Biomes!

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