We All Need to Care About the Ocean
The ocean and its many billions of organisms hold a special place in my heart. I grew up going to the beach every weekend, playing in the waves, searching for fish, dolphins, and crabs. The ocean was a source of endless fascination, and I spent countless hours staring at the tanks of aquariums or the ocean dioramas in the basement of the Natural History Museum in Manhattan. My love of the ocean led to a career working with the fish and other animals that inhabit it. No one has ever had to explain to me the importance of the ocean because to me it is a dear old friend whose loss would be devastating.
But not everyone is like me. Many, if not most people, are indifferent to the ocean. Some are even fearful of it, due to its ability to cause death and destruction through the creation of tsunamis, hurricanes, or terrifying deep-sea creatures. If you fall into this group, this article is for you, because even if you don’t love the ocean, you should care about the threats facing it. We humans are connected to, and dependent on, the ocean, and if it is damaged or destroyed, we all lose.
A Source of Oxygen
Most life on Earth, humans included, are permanently indebted to a microscopic group of marine aquatic single celled organisms called cyanobacteria for the atmosphere we depend on today. Cyanobacteria were the first creatures to learn photosynthesis, and as a side product, began pumping out gaseous oxygen into the atmosphere (Dismukes et al. 2001). The slow accumulation of oxygen eventually allowed for aerobic respiration and the explosion of multicellular lifeforms that depend on it to power their bodies, including mammals like us humans (Dismukes et al. 2001).
2.8 billion years have passed since the first modern photosynthetic organism appeared, and cyanobacteria are no longer the only producers of oxygen on Earth (Dismukes et al. 2001). Even so, we remain highly dependent on the ocean for the atmospheric oxygen we all breath. Marine species of algae are responsible for more than half of all oxygen production that occurs today (Chapman 2013).
A Source of Food
The World Health Organization estimates that over 1 billion people are dependent on seafood for survival (World Health Organization 2020), and over 3 billion people receive at least one fifth of their daily protein from seafood (Bennett et al 2018). Americans are no exception, consuming over 16 pounds of seafood per year on average (Kearns 2020). Seafood, whether wild caught or aquaculture produced, is critical for adequately feeding the human population of the planet. If we let the oceans die, we will be left with famine of unimaginable proportions. This will also lead to all the likely consequences of famine, including immigration of refugees, increased disease, and war.
The Great Protector of Our Climate
The oceans also play an extremely outsized role in buffering climate change. CO2 is the most important gas in our atmosphere when it comes to climate change, and the ocean is great at removing it from the atmosphere. For one, as already mentioned, more than half of all photosynthesis is performed by marine algae. Photosynthesis is one of the only natural processes to remove CO2 from the air, so without marine organisms the planet would be able to convert significantly less CO2 into oxygen (and incorporate the carbon into living organisms).
Not only do marine algae remove CO2 from the air to use in photosynthesis, the ocean itself naturally absorbs roughly one third of atmospheric CO2 (Tso 2021). This means that a significant fraction of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels is prevented from staying in the atmosphere where it can trap heat and fuel climate change. Unfortunately, what is good for life on the planet is not necessarily good for marine creatures, since this absorbed CO2 acts as a weak acid when it enters the ocean (Benway 2021). Many marine invertebrates, especially mollusks and coral reef cnidarians, rely on the ocean having a constant pH level. Even small decreases in pH can prevent proper formation of their calcium rich shells or exoskeletons, making life more energetically difficult or even impossible with large decreases in pH (Benway 2021).
Additionally, the natural properties of water means that the ocean absorbs roughly 90% of the heat that is trapped by our atmosphere (Tso 2021). This helps stabilize temperatures by absorbing heat during the day, and releasing it back out at night. Without the ocean, daily temperature cycles would be much more extreme, with swings of 50+°F at dusk or dawn. This capacity to absorb heat also means that over longer time periods of years, decades, or centuries, the global temperature increase that we have experienced because of climate change has been greatly tempered by the ocean. Instead of experiencing a global temperature rise of approximately 1°C (1.8°F) since 1880 (Green and Jacobs 2021), we would probably be experiencing closer to 10°C (18°F) over this time, which would be incompatible with human life as we know it.
A Potential Source of Vast Resources
The ocean is a place of vast potential mineral, energy, and medical resources. Deep ocean mining has the potential for severe economic damage, as has been shown through the catastrophic consequences of petrochemical drilling accidents such as the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. At the same time, the deep oceans contain mineral deposits of cobalt, copper, lithium, nickel, zinc, silver, and gold that are critical to the batteries needed for the clean energy transition. Additionally, there are potential deposits of other rare-earth elements that are needed in the new technologies that we use to power our lives, such as processors in computers and smart phones (Amon et al. 2021). The ocean is an ideal place to produce clean energy, with coastal wind farms perfectly combining a nearly constant source of strong winds (due to lack of topography to block air flow) and close proximity to most large population centers in the United States and globally (Kammen et al. 2021). Utilizing our oceans in an environmentally and ethically responsible way will be one of the cornerstones to successfully fighting climate change.
In addition to these inorganic ocean resources, the vast genetic resources of the ocean are a potential boon to medical science. Drugs like antibiotics and other chemotherapeutics are rarely discovered in a vacuum. Instead, like the penicillin producing fungus first being isolated from a moldy cantaloupe (Gaynes 2017), drugs are often discovered when a fellow organism is found to be producing something useful to humans. The oceans contain the largest source of untapped biodiversity on the planet, and many as of yet unobserved animals, plants, fungi, algae, and bacteria likely produce compounds that fight infectious diseases, treat cancer, or cure a variety of other diseases (Amon et al. 2021). New genetic sequencing technology is constantly reducing the time and cost of discovering these new compounds, but we can only find them if we don’t allow life in the ocean to be destroyed first.
Conclusion
Even if you don’t live near the ocean, you benefit personally from its existence. To quote former US President John F. Kennedy, “we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea — whether it is to sail or to watch it — we are going back from whence we came.” We would do well to remember this connection to the sea since it is more than merely psychological. If we let the ocean die, we will perish with it.
References:
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Kearns M. 2020. US seafood consumption rises to highest level since 2007, but falls short of USDA recommendations. https://www.seafoodsource.com/news/supply-trade/us-seafood-consumption-rises-to-the-highest-level-seen-since-2007-but-falls-short-of-usda-recommendations#:~:text=On%20average%2C%20Americans%20consumed%2016.1,NOAA%20Fisheries%20on%2021%20February. Accessed October 26, 2020.
Tso K. 2021. “Why is the ocean so important for climate change?”. MIT Climate Portal. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/why-ocean-so-important-climate-change. Accessed December 13, 2021
World Health Organization. 2020. “Availability and consumption of fish.” https://www.who.int/nutrition/topics/3_foodconsumption/en/index5.html. Accessed October 26, 2020.
