 I want to first off thank all of you guys for participating in yesterday's post. Successfully, and really good, was the deep sea, Ecclesiastes, that which is far off and exceedingly deep series kind of like Planet Earth from the BBC, and that might have actually been a remake of this, because it said on the cover that it was from a PBS series, so that's accessible to the public, so. From a spot above the center of the Pacific, looking down upon the Marquesas or Samoa or Phoenix Islands, the globe is almost all blue, like a sky filled with few clouds. The surface of our world is nearly three-quarters water, and therefore, and there are those who think it should be called, here is 50% water, the southern hemisphere is 90%. When we call these waters, the Indian, the Arctic, the Antarctic, the North and South Atlantic, and the North and South, Pacific water circulates between them, and it's are merely islands in one vast ocean, the Pacific. The Pacific Ocean alone is larger in area than all the land. In Greece, Aristotle taught that the world was made of just four elements, water, earth, air, and fire. Today, the scientists have identified many times that number of chemical elements, but modern scientists, when they look at Planet Earth, they still like to speak of four spheres, solid earth, which is the lithosphere, like lithic meaning rock or stone. The water, the hydro, so forth is the life or biosphere. And the hydrosphere, of course, is what we're talking about today. And it works immediately with the other three elements. 97% of the water on the planet is in the ocean. The ocean is key to the vagaries of our weather and climate. For all these reasons, the ocean will help us decide whether our planet remains. That was a nice little introduction. The ocean, like the solid earth, were stagnant wastes, like Davy Jones' locker. The closer we get, the more restless. Hey, look, futuristic ships, submarines, robot buoys, and even satellites are discovering more and more profound and exotic turbulence and swirling brushstrokes, like those of, I was really impressed with it. So I wanted to just bring that up briefly to some of the ocean, the hydrosphere, I guess it's called. The earliest sailors sensed that the world's glands were surrounded by water before they ever knew there were seven seas and seven continents. The first clay tablet, 3,000 years old, shows the world as a disk with a band that encircles the earth with grease at its center. This religious conception of planet Earth shows the dawn river in Russia the Nile River in Africa. You can see all in one in the form of a great crucifix. And I guess that's it right there in Africa. Anyways, I guess I could elaborate on that. But we're talking about the deep sea right now, the concept of ocean current. Just like there are breezes and great trade winds, global scale, global scale. Of course you have tides that ebb and flow, but some of the most deep currents that take the ocean's currents flow like conveyor about great distances, which play a dominant role specifically. Ocean currents they travel influence the temperature because they bring mass, mass, mass, mass. Tangible examples for me is the Gulf Stream because I'm in Florida. The Gulf Stream makes Northwest Europe much more temperate, which means temperate or tepid climates, which means that it drops into the sixties, fair night maybe, Celsius during the winter, but roughly the ocean currents for sure. The Gulf Stream that goes by my back door here gets cold enough down here in South Florida to need a wetsuit, for instance. So in the Gulf Stream, and I'm about to show you a it makes Northwest Europe, Scandinavia, England in latitude. So it definitely affects it. So there's something called a thermohaline circulation and you can see it goes down the mid-Atlantic underneath that Haw from Africa in this whole process takes a thousand years. Oh, interesting. There's these massive, massive clover purpose, one of their purposes, other than mediating consistent spreading of it's not their purpose, but it's a function they serve. It spreads food and algae and all the living things and nutrients. Let's see, here through the northeast of the Atlantic coastline of America, Europeans traveling the ocean the Atlantic were very much aware of which direction circular motion of the North Atlantic. I think it's really fascinating that the ocean is so much more live and yet consistent than I would have thought. There's these massive structures, these massive whirls hundreds of miles wide. In 1977, which is not as old when this book was written, scientists, scientists, aquanauts. Of course, because this was written when the the moon landing was still pretty fresh and everybody's mind. So aquanauts, astronauts, you know, they are actually really cool. They had set out to settle a question about the mid-ocean ridge to forget was a theory that was only less than 15 years old. These guys actually dropped what's called thermistors, which just means a little firm a theory that the mid-Atlantic ridge that runs north and south right up the middle of the Atlantic that it was plates theoretically should have been in the process of still confirming the plate tectonic theory. And there the floor should have been hot as the curve of ascending heat abruptly fell off. So it was a mystery because when they went to measure it they got progressively closer and it was getting hotter and hotter and hotter but then when they actually got on top of it the heat signature disappeared. It disappeared completely. What was this? What was damping the fires at the ridge? And then the second mystery that this ties into is the background of the deep sea exploration. But obviously there's a lot more to explore. There's a second mystery and this one was centuries old. All over the world James Hutton was the first to recognize rains and rivers are forever wearing away. You know the rock in continents in tons and metric miles of tons have to breathe silt into lakes and down into the sea. The runoff is full of minerals including salts and biocarbonate or bicarbonate and chemicals produced in great quantities when rainwater weathers limestone. Some lakes have inlets but no outlets. No escaping streams. So the only way water can depart is by evaporation and in doing so the water leaves behind. Its load of minerals can virtually nothing can grow. The world ocean itself is sort of like a sunken great giant lake. All inlets no outlets lead to roam all flowing rivers. Yet the ocean is not choked full of bicarbonates. So the question was why isn't the ocean a vast dead sea? Which is pretty interesting. In 1965 when the theory of plate tectonics was taking shape but not yet respectable so in 1965 when we were just about to land on the moon plate tectonics wasn't even really verified and was not even widely accepted as having conclusive evidence for its existence. John W. Elder in 1965 British geologist John W. Elder made a shrewd suggestion on land there are places where magma lies pooled near the surface water seeping down New Zealand flying up energy for hydrothermal power were the first in the United States. There might be hot springs, ice cold water seawater might meander down through the cracks and fissures and meet magma and explode because the magma was cooled by the seawater less heat would flow up through the seafloor sediments what is more seawater superheated in the fissures of basalt would exchange chemicals with the rock bicarbonate in the water would fizz into potentially carbon dioxide and the hidden fires and cauldrons would keep the seas chemistry. In 1973 four years after the first men landed on the moon, scientists and tiny submarines made their way down into the time for the first time into the rift valley of the mid Atlantic Ocean Ridge there they found frozen beds of basalt twisted in the same in the same strange swirling ropey shapes that lava makes when they cool eerie fields of black tormented stone that the Polynesians this was a great discovery it proved that eruptions do occur from time to time along the mid ocean ridge as a theory of plate tectonics had predicted but the scientists and aquanauts did not see any hot water jetting up from the basalt apparently they landed on a dormant so in search of a live vent they went all the way to the pacific since it's ridge is livelier and more fiery than the Atlantic was the only surveyed the land before the divers began and the lulu which carried the submarine alvin alvin is what they used so there were lots of people and they dropped down to 7500 feet which you know divide by three I guess that's 2,500 meters sorry my stomach is really hungry so they were picking up all these rock samples and it was kinda boring like the Atlantic trip and then they stopped to pick up one rock sample with alvin's remote controlled mechanical arm and the pilot wrestled with the manipulator they began to lose interest in the rock and at the same instant both noticed intervening water like the air above instantly they dropped the basalt and went up the slope and there they came upon this spectacle that no one, not even elder had expected spread out upon the basalt were dense masses of giant mussels people back on the ship thought there was something wrong with the submarine because they were so ecstatic and when you're especially down in those depths you get what's called narcosis the first stage indication that you're succumbing to narcosis is feeling like you're drunk and it's an immediate pretty much near immediate feeling of euphoria you know so people you kinda go crazy and then you're gonna black out shortly after that and their first discovery the expedition scientists made dive after dive in the alvin they found five separate oasis which they dubbed clam bake one, two um seen from above the ring of white clams stands out against the black like a halo at each site hot milky shimmering water rose from the vents and fishers in the floor shellfish clustered around the warmest vents all but choking them below of huddle feather duster worms browsed brittle stars purple anemones and wavy fronds a few black basalt pillows were draped with something white in stringy which looked like masses of spaghetti so it was just another deep sea worm above the heads of all these creatures swayed the strangest creatures of them all giant worms and they looked like blood red tulips four to ten feet tall with stems as white as chalk so the oasis was a um a secret archipelago as strangers and full of marbles as darwins beloved glopagos this says these giant tube worms it says these giant tube worms are sustained that's about all the time I have for this today sorry if I didn't get to the deep sea as much as you wanted but I'm really really grateful that so many of you guys participated in the post I hope this was this was a fun interaction so I wanted to jump right on it and get it done and put out Friday night hopefully not with any luck with any luck it's Friday night so people who uploaded that