The book opens by looking at how knowledge about the oceans, and life within the ocean is less advanced than that of land. ‘A hundread years ago much of our ocean was a mystery – a vast, hidden world visible only in the imagination’. At teh time, our knowledge of life on land was well advanced. Yet of the species occupying the ohter two-thirds of our planet’s surface and 99 per cent of its habitable area, only fragments were known; ephemeral glimpses encouraging us to seek further and deeper.’
‘Ocean’ is a far more appropriate name for our world than ‘Earth’. Today just over 70 per cent of our plant’s surface is covered in salt water connectedinto a single panetary ocean. The shifting of techonic pates and the ebbs and flows of ice ages govern the map of our ocean, but for the last 10,000 years or so its major points of connection have been as they are today.
Teh ocean plays a vital role in moderating teh glob’s climate. It acts a little like a giant sponge soaking up carbon dioxide (CO2) and heat. It is estimated that between 1800 and 1994 a staggering 118,000 billion kilograms of anthropogenic CO2 has been absorbed by the ocean. And between 1994 and 2007 one-third of all our CO2 emissions were taken up by the ocean. While this has saved us so far from runaway global heating, it has serious consequences for marine life.
Witnessing the recovery fo the blue wale over hte last forty years from just a few hundred in 1982 to between 5,000 and 15,000 today testfies to the importance of global cooperation, the power of the ociean to restore its numbers – and the indomitable spirit of those who fort so hard and with such success to protect these majestic creatures.
Plastics now permeate every level of the marine food web. They have been found in the ocean’s deepest trench and at great depths in all five oceans basins. A study in 2023 found that over ‘the last two decades the number of marine species known to have ingested or become entangled in debris (of which the majority is plastic) has more than trebled’. It is widely understood that , wehn directly eaten – known as primray ingestion – plastic can have an impact on marine species. While it can often be hard to say for certain whether or not a particular animal was directly killed by plastic, we do know that ingestion is widespread.
Discovery is one of the great jos of exploring hte natural world – whether that’s actively seekign or uncovering something you have never seen before or that wonderful moment when a new piece of the puzzle falls into place and you suddenly realise why an aspect of nature functions in the wya it does. The last hundred years of humanity’s sutdy of hte ocean has brought plenty of both.
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