The Ocean World [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION The Third Infinity Twenty-seven years ago, I wanted to keep an eye permanently open into the oceans, so I equipped the bow of my new ship Calypso with an underwater observation chamber. At that time, I was convinced that the oceans were immense, teeming with life,rich in resources of all kinds; during the long crossings in the Indian Ocean or in the Atlantic, I spent many hours, day and night, looking through my undersea portholes, dreaming of Captain Nemo in the Nautilus. But soon I had to face the evidence: the blue waters of the open sea appeared to be, most of the time, a discouraging desert. Like the deserts on land, it was far from dead, but the live ingredient, plankton, was thinly spread, like haze, barely visible and monotonous. Then, exceptionally, areas turned into meeting places; close to shores and reefs, around floatmg weeds or wrecks, fish would gather and make a spectacular display of vitality and beauty. Years of diving have revealed to me that the same situation occurs on the bottom of the sea. On the floor as in midwater, endless deserts are spotted with rare but exuberant oases. The "oasis theory" was to help me understand that the ocean, huge as it may be when measured at human scale, is a thin layer of water covering most of our planet—a very small world in fact— extremely fragile and at our mercy. Yet, it is in the primordial ocean that life originated, approximately 3.5 billion years ago, in the shape of very simple cells. The most recent explorations of outer space have demonstrated that our planet Earth— our Water planet, I should write—is the only planet in the solar system to be endowed with appreciable quantities of liquid water. Life, born in water, must be at least.as rare as water in the universe, and as such must be revered, under any of its forms, as a miracle. Diving in the open sea, I have encountered salps, barrel-shaped jelly creatures, linked to each other to form gracious living chains one hundred feet long, that must have inspired the legend of the divine belt worn by Venus; the sight of a Medusa, a delicate transparent dome of pulsating crystal suggested to me irresistibly that life is organized water and that life identifies itself with the water system of our planet. Another time, diving in the Red Sea, in the archipelago off Suakin, 1 found the water so clear that shark's and barracudas seemed to be suspended in a three-dimensional nothingness,around exuberant coral reef communities, medleysof colorful patches, bustling swimmers, drifters, crawlers, and dwellers; the reef was actually noisy: choruses made of faint cracks, groans, and hisses were playing a vibrant symphony to the miracles of life and death. There I learned that variety is the essence of a healthy life system. In the Sea of Oman, north and northeast of the coast of Somali, I encountered ocean-borne intelligence—whales, spermwhales, orcas, and dolphins. The marine mammals were displaying their power, their speed, their smartness; but the more 1 observed the creatures of the sea, the more I could relate them to those that live in our dry world. The behavior of fish, squid, birds, or whales was governed by the same basic motivations as that of snakes, insects, or apes. To me, the unity of life was in beautiful evidence. Assumption Island, isolated in the Indian Ocean, north of Madagascar, was one of the richest undersea sanctuaries 1 ever visited; but when I came back thirteen years later, I found out that extensive damage had already been done to the coral fringe of the island, either by overfishing or by pollution. The fragility of marine ecosystems became obvious to me. Unfortunately, I had soon to acknowledge the fact that the oceans were rapidly deteriorating worldwide. Groupers were virtually eliminated from the Mediterranean; the Great Barrier Reef was slowly decaying; coral gardens of New Caledonia were choked and buried under millions of tons of waste from a huge nickel-mining complex; whales were decimated in the Antarctic; men were no exception: I have visited the vanishing Kawashkars in southern Patagonia, the last authentic "nomads of the sea," rugged people who had for millennia successfully lived naked on their boats, diving in ice-cold water for clams; there are fewer than twenty of these people left today. Fragility of the marine environment, fragility of man, precariousness of resources, are facts that we have to reckon with. At sea level, caves are carved into the cliffs by waves and sand beaches are created by marine