Earths Oceans

Leading-edge anti-inflammatory drugs and potentially life-saving cancer treatments contain ingredients from fish and marine organisms.

Many of the foods you eat contain compounds derived from marine life.

There are 3 to 500 million species of organisms in the ocean, yet these vast resources are largely unexplored. To learn more about everyday products that come from the ocean environment, take a walk through the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History's Ocean Planet "virtual exhibit" website: seawifs.gsfc.nasa.gov/ocean_planet.html

To learn more about coral reefs, visit Hawaii Sea Grant's "1997: International Year of the Reef" website: www.soest.hawaii.edu/SEAGRANT/coralreef.html