Planet Ocean

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For a long time

I watched the ocean

without understanding it.

I could see the enormous energy

the feel of water.

I was amazed at the deep blue color.

I breathed the air

of the vast open waters.

But in reality, I saw nothing.

Here in Shark Bay in Australia

the cliffs whisper to me

the history of the earth.

They are born from the ocean of life,

a vast graveyard arise

billions of skeletons of sea creatures

standing on the seabed have accumulated

when the earth itself was only ocean.

These organisms

created the air that I breathe

and the atmosphere that protects me.

I see strong tidal

cutting those tracks in the sand.

I do not see that this movement

is the source of all life.

I see how the wind shapes the dunes.

I do not see the profound relationship

between the earth and the sea.

I see how salt makes the earth white.

I do not see what the ocean brings to life

on the continents.

I see vast prairies

which colonize the depths

as I have never seen on land.

But at Shark Bay, there is more.

Here lies the origin of our story,

of us, humanity.

It starts here

with a colony of living fossils,

bacteria attached to the surface

of ocean life, the stromatolites.

I am a descendant

of this form of life,

whose birth dates

4 billion years.

I came from the ocean.

And now,

looking at the ocean,

I only see us, humanity.

We are seven billion people.

We have formed the world

in our image.

On the shores of the ocean

We have built large cities

where we live in millions.

We dug ports, flattened islands

to build factories.

The ocean has given us all mineral

resources of the globe.

We process materials, smelting steel,

cutting and chopping.

Hundred thousand ships

crisscrossing over the seas.

Everything that lives and grows on earth,

eventually comes into our iron grip.

We even carry the woods.

We constantly digging in the ocean

to nourish us.

We have become a super predator.

We put our lives in boxes.

We ship 600 million containers,

thanks to the ocean.

The ocean which gave us

the opportunity of globalization.

The planet is ours.

And how do we go from here?

I am aware

the consequences of my power.

Overfishing, global warming,

depletion of natural resources, pollution,

my actions have many consequences.

I know this

because I am able

to understand what is happening to me.

How did I reach this point

where I no longer see

what is happening around me?

To understand this,

we must go back to the beginning.

In the beginning the earth

itself was destroyed

and was plagued by violent convulsions.

The melting accompanied by

violent meteor impacts

from the solar system.

This battlefield created an atmosphere

which was stormy, red of nitrogen,

carbon and hydrogen.

And water vapor, which probably came from

ice comets of the galaxy...

The surface of the earth

was like a huge bubble

which was heated under pressure

to more than 700C.

Then the fire cooled

and the vapors condensed

to produce the greatest of all earthly

floods.

That was four billion years ago.

The flood covered almost all

the earth's crust.

The water washed over the prehistoric rocks,

loaded with salt,

so that it eroded.

The earth was a world of salt water.

This water was called the ocean.

An ocean planet was born.

During the Ice Age,

700 million years ago,

the temperature dropped.

The planet remained white

20 million years ago

and then began to melt

by a powerful greenhouse effect

that was created

by the carbon of the volcanoes.

There were several ice ages

which were interspersed with heat.

From this period

comes the vast icy areas

to the north and south poles of the globe.

These areas act as chillers

in a huge climate machine.

Close to the equator

the sun heats the ocean,

which seems to boil.

This contrasts

between the hot and cold regions

generates powerful airflow.

These are the winds

which are essential in this story.

The cold, heavy winds descend

from the polar regions

and collide with warm, light air

of the equator.

These winds, which rotate

by the rotation of the earth,

forming giant vortices.

If the winds come into contact

with the ocean, they push the water.

They generate strong currents

capable of moving millions of

cubic meters of water through the ocean.

The ocean is everywhere

furrowed by whirlpools,

some of which run for years.

This movement spreads heat

from the surface of the blue planet.

The warm water from the tropics

rises toward the poles.

This water cools, becomes even more compact

and is loaded with salt

back into the depths.

The water travels through the depths

towards the bottom of the ocean,

propelled by its own weight.

It brings with it the polar cold.

Ultimately, it collides against the bottom

and returns to the waters

to the surface, where the weather warms up.

It takes 1,000 years for one drop of water

to complete this ocean cycle.

These flows have created

a temperate climate on earth.

Thanks to this,

it is a living planet.

When the sun is powerful

and flows are rising to the surface

there is an extraordinary phenomenon,

so immense that it is

visible from space,

It is called a "bloom",

an explosion of life.

This life that appears,

is known as plankton,

"Floating life"

because it cannot move by itself,

instead following the currents.

This "blooms" comes from

the energy of the sun.

They occur between the surface

and the first hundred meters,

to where the rays of the sun

can penetrate the ocean.

The tiny algae that appear

form an immense marine prairie

floating in the water.

The biomass produced every year

represents half

of the vegetation on earth.

Some microalgae

resemble distant galaxies.

They are protists -

unicellular, very old organisms.

Most consists of only a cell

surrounded by a silicate

or calcium carbonate skeleton.

At this level,

The distinction

between plant and animal is unclear.

Some of these green cells

have limbs that they push upstream,

to increase

the surface facing the sun..

All these microalgae consume carbon

and provide oxygen in return.

Half of the air we breathe,

comes from the microalgae.

The ocean is the blue heart of the planet.

The plant bloom

trigger another explosion of life,

of billions of herbivorous animals

that feed on the sea prairie.

These animals are only a

few millimeters in size, often even smaller.

They are classified as jellyfish,

crustaceans, cells, shellfish, larvae,

thousands of groups of species.

The most important of these

are the innumerable krill,

the small shrimp that graze algea

day and night.

And copepods, water fleas,

which are kind of jumping

with their limbs to move forward.

The copepods are pursued

by carnivores in the plankton,

especially by arrowhead predators

who are voracious

and armed with teeth of silicon.

Every moment of life

is an act of survival.

Prey and predators alternate

constantly

and there is always a bigger

predator to swallow the previous ones.

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