The Ocean Apocalypse Is Upon Us, Maybe

From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaotic than we can imagine. Its waters move in ways that lack a terrestrial equivalent and, in doing so, the ocean shirks tidy metaphor.

Right now, in the Atlantic Ocean alone, a single current, the Gulf Stream, is moving more water than all the world’s rivers combined. Across the ocean’s face, invisible to the naked eye, hundreds of eddies are whirling. Most of them are larger than the state of Rhode Island and reach more than three miles into the deep.

We are doing large-scale experiments to our global climate system.

The ocean’s power reaches far onto land. Its movements transport vast amounts of salt, nutrients, oxygen, CO₂, and heat across the planet. In the absence of ocean currents, large portions of Earth would be uninhabitable due to buildups of extreme heat and cold around equatorial regions and poles, respectively. The ocean is the engine that powers so much of our climate and, by extension, the throttle and governor that regulates it. Above all, the ocean sets the stage upon which we conduct our lives. 

Change a current and you can change how heat travels around the planet. You can change temperature, change rainfall, change everything that makes a place habitable to you and me. But in an era when humanity’s actions test and destabilize Earth’s delicate balances, many oceanographers believe that we are