September 2025 | Oceanography
89
TEACHING
PHYSICAL CONCEPTS
IN OCEANOGRAPHY
AN INQUIRY-BASED APPROACH
pushed through without proper review. The one problem in the
good old-fashioned library access is that once a paper is on the
shelf, the retraction doesn’t take it off the shelf. Although I encour-
age students to avoid too much online web searching, one big
advantage of using something like Google Scholar is that it does
give access to any retraction alongside a peer-reviewed article on
the publisher’s website, or the article may even have been removed.
What is of interest is that, for now at least, ChatGPT seems
to give a balanced and accurate view of the science background
to a number of key questions. For the sake of this article, on
September 1, 2025, I asked ChatGPT three questions: What impact
does CO2 have on the globe? Is the ocean being affected by climate
change? And, controversially, “Is Simon Boxall any good at writ-
ing articles”? The answers I got for the first two were word perfect
and accurate and didn’t hold back on the issues—an article for the
future on AI in education! The last one stated: “His articles benefit
from deep scientific knowledge, but he communicates them clearly
and accessibly to a general audience. Coverage of pressing envi-
ronmental issues suggests he can translate complex concepts into
engaging, understandable prose.” I guess it is not always right, but
I could save the cost of having an agent and just employ ChatGPT.
The third area is that we need to reinforce the ethics of being
a scientist—to report in a truthful and honest way, backed up by
evidence regardless of what the desired outcome might have been
(we used to call it testing a hypothesis). To emphasize this, we pro-
vide all our first-year students with a booklet on plagiarism and
academic integrity. Getting the “wrong” outcome is called exper-
imentation; it is often said research is 95% sweat and tears and
5% success. Forcing the outcome to be “correct” shows a lack of
integrity and has no place in scientific endeavor. As an educator,
I do very occasionally see poor examples of academic integrity—a
project written by a postgrad for an undergraduate, direct copying
of another student’s work, use of the dreaded AI to write an essay
word for word. In the first case, it is obvious when drafts of work
are poor but then suddenly appear as outstanding bits of research
a week later. With plagiarism, online submission tools search the
web for phrases from both literature and other student submis-
sions going back a few years. While AI can be a lazy way of essay
writing, posing the same question often gives the same text, so if
more than one student resorts to it for an essay, then they are sunk.
On that basis, I’m off to see if ChatGPT still overinflates my ego.
AUTHOR
Simon Boxall (srb2@noc.soton.ac.uk), University of Southampton, National
Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK.
ARTICLE CITATION
Boxall, S. 2025. How to get factual data and articles: Surviving in today’s online world.
Oceanography 38(3):88–89, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2025.e313.
COPYRIGHT & USAGE
This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a
link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made
to the original content.
This supplement to Oceanography focuses on educa-
tional approaches to help engage students in learning
and offers a collection of hands-on/minds-on activities
for teaching physical concepts that are fundamental in
oceanography. These key concepts include density, pres-
sure, buoyancy, heat and temperature, and gravity waves.
The ocean provides an exciting context for science educa-
tion in general and physics in particular. Using the ocean
as a platform to which specific physical concepts can be
related helps to provide the environmental relevance that
science students are often seeking.
The activities described in this supplement were devel-
oped as part of a collaboration between scientists and
education specialists, and they were implemented in
two undergraduate courses that targeted sophomores,
juniors, and seniors (one for marine science majors and
one including both science and education majors) and in
four, week-long workshops for middle- and high-school
science teachers.
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By Lee Karp-Boss, Emmanuel Boss, Herman Weller,
James Loftin, and Jennifer Albright
September 2025 | Oceanography
89