Classic images of marine life in the waters around Orkney mark the 60th anniversary of Heriot-Watt University’s Scientific Diving Team, with stories of some of their underwater surveys in Scapa Flow and further afield – from horse mussel reefs and flame shell beds to seagrass meadows and kelp forests. Prof. Joanne Porter from their Stromness base is joined by Prof. Bill Sanderson and Prof. Hamish Mair.

It was washed up on the rocks below the cliffs of Rothiesholm in 1808 and if it was a basking shark then it was fifteen feet longer than anything ever recorded. And you can see a small piece of it in the summer exhibition, Sea Stories, in the Stromness Museum. Dr Howie Firth tells the story of the sea creature and the work of Dr Yvonne Simpson in opening up clues to the mystery – and the possible literary consequences for literature as well as science – and of an even deeper mystery that may remain.

Why are the world’s problems so insoluble, dragging on from one year to the next, with no sign of any fresh ideas to resolve them? It’s because of their very nature, says Prof. Susan Krumdieck: our increasingly complex society is producing highly complex problems that have no straightforward solution – but approaches are being found.

Driftwood gathers barnacles, piers develop seaweed, slipways attract limpets – the life of the sea ensures that everything within it becomes part of the activity of the underwater world. And so, wondered artist Jenny Pope, could a tiny mini-island cast out to float in Stromness harbour become an image for each of us today, of somehow staying afloat in uncertain times and finding links to the natural world through a web of life that is also looking for a home and a way ahead through stormy waters? Joined by others in the project, she tells the story of the little Shoogly Holm, due to be lifted on Sunday, and of the community involvement and how life has built up around it, with help and underwater images from partners in the project.

Populations are changing, and the various forms of media affect us all. Does this mean that dialect is fated to go the way of the great auk and the cruisie lamp? Can social media help? Could it even become a language – as has happened in Shetland? Dr Tom Rendall and Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon look at views and examples to open up the debate.

R. V. Jones was a practical joker in peacetime – and a master of the arts of wartime deception, in a continuing battle of technology with technique and counter-technique. In the post-war world he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen – where one of his students in the mid-1960s was Dr Tom Stevenson from Orkney, who tells the story of Prof. Jones’s secret war and his teaching methods – and some of his remarkable measurement techniques.

When Britain found itself at war with Japan, it was desperately short of fluent Japanese speakers to help with the many translation tasks – including codebreaking. Young men and women with a language talent were urgently recruited and given crash courses in Japanese and sent overseas with their new skills. Prof. Peter Kornicki tells the story of linguists at war – and how the Brisbane decrypting and translating team included a young man from Orkney, David Eunson, who would eventually teach Latin at Stromness Academy.