| Abstract: | While the ocean traditionally has attracted little attention within geography, we are now entering an era when marine research is increasingly technologically feasible and, at the same time, human interactions with ocean-space are ever more intense and complex. In response to these changes, a number of geographers ranging from critical development theorists to scholars of global environmental change to biogeographers have turned their attention to the study of marine areas. This article (and the articles that follow in this focus section) brings the ocean to the attention of human and physical geographers, both as an object of study in its own right and as a space for interpreting global social and physical processes and developing geographic techniques that span the land-sea divide. |
