Planet Ocean (Planète Océan)

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 700°C.

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.

This huge food chain nourishes all organisms, from small to large.

The plankton is an open book

where we can read the history of the ocean.

For 3 billion years life evolved here

in this sea prairie.

Some very old species, as the gelatinous animals,

can only occur in the ocean.

In perfect harmony with the fluid environment

they possess an elastic body

which they simultaneously can absorb food and move.

Sometimes, they cling to each other

and form a huge chain making it easier to move along with the flow.

It looks chaotic,

but every living creature is organized down to the smallest detail.

These explosions of life eventually disappear,

consumed by lack of food sources or eradicated by an invisible enemy,

an attack by a virus.

Billions of viruses,

whose biological role is in the regulation of any explosion of life.

Nature does not support excess.

At the end of the winter

mackerel have left their hibernation in the depths of the ocean.

They come to the surface looking for the sea prairie.

As many fish species, they feed on this invisible plankton,

The food chain interconnects the species.

The fish have no leader,

but still know to maneuver in perfect formation.

Each fish is continually aware of the presence of its neighbors,

and respects their distance.

This self-organization is a fundamental law of the group.

It allows them to hunt as a school

and increase the chances to find an area rich in food.

The first to find one,

may guide the other with a single movement.

The food chain takes another turn.

The sailfish is the fastest fish in the ocean.

It feeds on other fish, not plankton.

The dorsal offers exceptional stability to achieve its goal.

A sailfish of 100 pounds consume in his life 1000 pounds mackerel,

who consumed 10,000 pounds zooplankton

that grazed 100,000 pounds phytoplankton.

For every pound of swordfish, must be 1000 times more of the sea prairie.

The food chain is a relentless hierarchy, a pyramid structure.

Some species prefer to help each other.

Manta rays only eat plankton.

The wingspan of six meters provides protection for other fish.

They, in return, rid their host of smaller fish parasites.

Others opt for the whale shark,

the biggest of all fish.

The traveler travels the entire ocean, also in search of plankton.