Ocean Origins on Earth - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 16

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Ocean Origins on Earth
At the beginning of all things, there was Father Sky, whose name was
Uranus, and Mother Earth, who was called Gaia. Uranus lay over Gaia
and fathered many children. These children included the Titans, and
the Hekatonkheires—giants with 100 arms—and also the mighty
one-eyed Cyclops. This being the mythology of the Ancient Greeks,
the family did not run smoothly, and Uranus was not an ideal parent.
We will, in these gentler times, draw a veil over quite how the children
were treated, and exactly in what way they obtained their revenge
over their father. One of the children though, a Titan, amid all the pas-
sions and the bloodiness, held aloof. He neither acted out vengeance
then, nor later joined his siblings in the Titanomachy when they chal-
lenged, in battle, the gods on Olympus.
This was Oceanus, who was the god, or personification, of the
world-encircling ocean. With his wife, Tethys, he simply made the
world bloom and prosper, by governing the distribution of the world's
springs and rivers and lakes and rainclouds. The Ancient Greeks, here,
showed a nice premonition of the true nature of the global water
cycle. In deriving this planet's oceans from a union of the Earth and
the heavens, they may have guessed correctly, too. The truth is, we
don't know. The origins of the world's oceans are still a tantalizing
mystery.