Mark Schrope is a full-time journalist and outreach consultant based in Florida who hates bad contracts. Much of his work focuses on ocean topics. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Nature, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Caribbean Travel & Life, and Scuba Diving, and he wrote the contracts chapter of the Science Writers’ Handbook. Past assignments have taken him into the eye of a hurricane, to the seafloor multiple times by submersible, to remote islands, and to the Sinai Desert.