Seven Seas

In Today's Nearly New Year Issue

Seven Sea
The Sea
That's Amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing
Random Joke
Finish with a Song

How many oceans on this planet?

Seven seas we were told

But of course, that’s just our perception

There is but one, deep and cold

It’s salty tears envelope our world

Its blueness mirrors the sky above

Man has crossed it in boats of iron

Fisherman lost in its embrace of love

It creates our seasons, makes our rain

Whips the wind and erodes the earth

The sea is our thermostat

It will be there at our death as it was at our birth.

A pantry, a feeder, the birthplace of all

A toilet, a waste place, to flush crap away

We choke it; we poison it, we fill it with rubbish

Now plastic is found that cannot decay

Man-made garbage has covered the earth

It spills into oceans and spreads its death

From plant life to fish and crustation, all life

Nothing is safe we’ll take their last breath

So cry the seas, wash away all our sins

Blow on the sand and wave us goodbye

We’ve changed your make up your chemical balance

From acid rain to deaths dear alkali

THE SEA

About 70 percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water, yet the oceans largely remain a mystery for scientists.

More is known about the moon's surface than the depths of the ocean. In fact, 12 people have stepped foot on the moon, but only three have been to the Mariana Trench — the deepest part of the ocean, at roughly 7 miles (11 kilometers) deep.

For every species of marine life we know of, at least another three are yet to be discovered

Our oceans teem with life ranging from the blue whale — the biggest animal on Earth — to tiny microbes.

But nobody knows exactly how many different species live in this environment. There is no data for around 20 per cent of the ocean's volume.

The Census of Marine Life, a 10-year international project to identify life in our oceans, found nearly 250,000 species. But scientists believe a least a million species of marine life could be out there, and that's not counting the tens or even hundreds of millions of kinds of microbes that make up the majority of marine life.

What we do know is that ocean life survives in the most extreme environments. Scientists have found life that can survive in temperatures that melt lead, where seawater freezes into ice, or there's no light or oxygen.

In fact, the dark ocean zone between 1000 and 5000 metres known as the abyssal zone has a far greater range of marine life than we once thought.

Water takes around 1000 years to travel all the way around the whole globe

The oceans not only have waves, tides and surface currents — they also have a constantly moving system of deep-ocean circulation driven by temperature and salinity.

Known as the global ocean conveyor belt or thermohaline current (thermo = temperature, haline = salinity), this deep ocean current gets one of its "starts" in the polar region near Norway.

As sea ice forms, the water left behind becomes saltier and denser and begins to sink, making room for warmer and less dense incoming surface water, which in turn eventually becomes cold and salty enough to sink.

The cold dense water flows along the ocean bottom all the way from the northern hemisphere to the Southern Ocean where it merges with more cold dense water from Antarctica and is swept into the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Eventually it mixes with warmer water and rises to the surface before finding its way back to the Atlantic. It can take 1000 years to complete this cycle.

Half of all the oxygen we breathe is produced in the ocean

Some of this oxygen is produced by sea weeds and sea grasses, but the vast majority of the oxygen is produced by phytoplankton, microscopic single celled organisms that have the ability to photosynthesise. These tiny creatures live in the surface layer of the ocean (and in lakes and rivers) and form the very base of the aquatic food chain.

During photosynthesis, phytoplankton remove carbon dioxide from sea water and release oxygen. The carbon becomes part of their bodies.

Oceans hold around 50 times more carbon than the atmosphere

Cold water can dissolve much more CO2 than warm water, so the cold polar regions are net absorbers of CO2. But as the cold water finds its way to warmer tropical areas, the oceans release CO2 back into the atmosphere. The equatorial Pacific is thought to be the biggest single natural source of CO2 in the atmosphere. Most of this carbon is exchanged with the atmosphere on a timescale of several hundred years.

Prior to the industrial revolution, the uptake and release of CO2 on land and ocean was in a dynamic equilibrium. Since then, the oceans are thought to have absorbed about half of the carbon dioxide released from the burning of fossil fuels, with the rest remaining in the atmosphere.

The great garbage patch is more like a plastic soup

The existence of the The Great Pacific Garbage 'patch' in the North Pacific Ocean was confirmed in 1997. It lies at the centre of a large rotating ocean current — or gyre. Since then, a soup of plastic pollution has been found at the centre of all the world's major gyres — in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic and in the Indian Ocean.

Plastic trash takes a very long time to bio-degrade in the oceans. The actions of sunlight and wave motion tend to break plastic objects into smaller and smaller pieces until they eventually become smaller than a grain of sand. That's why there is no obvious floating island of plastic debris, but rather a fine soup of plastic particles floating in the water column.

These fine particles are now thought to act like sponges, concentrating pollutants such as PCBs, DDT and PAHs. When the particles are ingested by filter feeding sea creatures, they enter the food chain and ultimately into fish destined for human consumption.

They also harbour unique colonies of microbes, but it is too early to say what impact this emerging 'plastisphere' will have on marine ecological environments.

Plastics only came into widespread use after 1945, but can already be found in every part of the marine environment from the surface to the seafloor.

The Atlantic Ocean is getting bigger and the Pacific Ocean is getting smaller

Twenty million years ago there was no Atlantic Ocean. But then, thanks to plate tectonics, the South American and North American continents were separated by a rift valley that eventually turned into the Atlantic Ocean. The complementary shapes of the South American and African continents have long been noticed, but it wasn't until the 1960s that the theory of plate tectonics became accepted as the explanation.

These days, the Atlantic Ocean is growing at a rate of five centimetres per year, as new sea floor is created by volcanic activity along its mid-ocean ridge.

On the other hand, the much older Pacific Ocean is currently estimated to be shrinking by two to three centimetres each year. Again, this comes down to plate tectonics because the Pacific Ocean has subduction zones on three sides — where the Pacific plate submerges beneath other plates.

The deepest manned ocean descent was achieved by Dr Jacques Piccard (Switzerland) and Lt. Donald Walsh (USA) who piloted the Swiss-built US Navy bathyscaphe Trieste to a depth of 10,911 m (35,797 ft) in the Challenger Deep section of the Mariana Trench on 23 January 1960. Challenger Deep is thought to be the deepest point on earth and is situated 400 km (250 miles) south-west of Guam in the Pacific Ocean

After exercise i always eat a whole pizza. Just kidding...........I don't exercise.

FINISH WITH A SONG - This is Bobby Darin, Beyond The Sea