Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
We eat seafood, but take an ocean cruise on ocean liners. Scientists study oceanography rather than “seao-
graphy.” Sea horses live in the ocean. In the summer, people go to the seashore, where they rent an ocean-
front house. When you feel lost, you're “at sea” instead of “at ocean.” And in the song “America the Beau-
tiful,” the lyrics don't say from “ocean to shining ocean.” Confused? No wonder.
The ocean has a special allure. People are drawn to it and find tranquility in the gentle lapping of waves
on a beach or something awesome in the majestic crashing of the big breakers. The endless cycle of tides
and waves hints powerfully at the earth's timelessness.
The ocean is our past. Life began in the oceans. The ocean is the home of the greatest number of living
things on this planet. The ocean even seems to be in our blood. Scientists tell us that the chemical makeup
of human body fluids is remarkably similar to that of ocean water.
And the ocean is our future. But it is increasingly a suspect future. What once was thought to be too big
to be contaminated is showing the wear and tear of the dumping of sewage, garbage, and industrial waste;
accidental oil spills; and even an act of war that unleashed millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf's
sensitive environment. Equally alarming is the growing threat that an upward shift in global temperatures
will raise ocean levels in the near future, with devastating consequences for coastal areas.
People who have sailed across the oceans or flown above them can begin to grasp the vastness of the
earth's great waters. But it probably wasn't until the space missions of the 1960s began to send back snap-
shots of the planet that people realized how wet and blue our planet truly is. Viewed from aloft, there isn't
a lot of earth on Earth. Those picture postcards from space didn't show great lands separating many oceans
and seas, but One Great Ocean, broken occasionally by parcels of land. As those space pictures made evid-
ent, the oceans are the earth's most prominent feature. They dictate our weather and have determined hu-
man history.
The One Great Ocean is an interconnecting body of saltwater covering almost three fourths of the plan-
et, more than 142 million square miles. That is twice the surface area of Mars and nine times the surface
area of the moon. Of the earth's remaining 30 percent, 24 percent is untillable desert, tundra, glacial ice,
and mountaintops, leaving humans about 6 percent on which to farm. All of which makes you feel a little
like the proverbial drop in a bucket.
How Many Oceans Are There?
