Today's soundtrack is The Taste of Chaos Ensemble: Performs Mastodon's Leviathan.
This evening's reading is the preface and the prologue of the National Geographic book Exploring the Deep Frontier: The Adventure of Man in the Sea.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau introduces the book by painting a picture of the ocean world as he's come to see it through thousands of dives. He says that the ocean is over-fished, and that emergency measures should "have been taken 10 years ago" (p 8). Cousteau says that the general public sees the ocean as "a setting for a pleasure cruise, not as a resource to be managed" (p. 8). He believes that the technology is available to us to save the ocean; however, we must convince the world leaders that saving the ocean is a priority, as it is "our planet's life belt" (p. 8).
The prologue is titled "Water, Essence of Life." The author points out that at the time of the book's writing (1980), humankind was exploring space, but still knew so little about what lies beneath the surface of the ocean. We know that Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has "abundant water in three forms: vapor, ice, and liquid" (p. 14). The life present in our seas far outweighs that on land, as even though 2/3 of the earth is water, sea life can live all the way down, whereas on land, animals do not live far below the surface. "Of the major divisions of animals and plants, each has at least some marine representation, and manhy live largely or entirely in the sea" (p. 18).
The H.M.S. Challenger, "the first oceanographic vessel to probe the waters of the world (p. 20), marked the start of our scientifically observing what lies under the waves. Technology is "essential in providing prolonged access to the sea" (p. 20); without it, we were as a species unable to truly explore the ocean.
