Oceans of Time

How our big blue ball puts things into perspective.

The cure for anything
is salt water:
sweat, tears,
or the sea.
—Isak Dinesen

I am obsessively linear. I am whatever the word is for someone who is the polar opposite of instinctive. I’m not spontaneous; I think about things a lot. “Intellectual” doesn’t seem right because I’m not that smart. Cerebral? Too in my head?

Whatever you call my brand of thinking, it is run by notions of rules that, if only followed, will answer all things simply and fairly.

That’s not how things happen in this old world.

That’s not even how things happen in the universe, which is measurably objective, doesn’t play favorites—doesn’t have things like corrupt judges and sleazy politicians. But, still, it does have things like arbitrarily flying chunks of rock and dying suns, and it still and repeatedly confounds our theories (our rules) about how it works.

This disturbs me. I can’t help it, I just seem wired to think that way—even when science lets me down. (I’ll bore you sometime with a story about the existential crisis I suffered in my 20s after learning that the big bang theories I’d learned in the fourth grade weren’t holding up.)

So, imagine my absolutely indescribable joy long ago when I learned about Pangea, the shape of our land mass back in the day. Finally! Something made logical sense. It was a giant jigsaw puzzle, and the pieces fit! As one educational site about geology notes,

By looking at the globe, we can see that the east coast of South America seems to fit perfectly, almost like a puzzle, into the west coast of Africa. We can also see that North America can be rotated slightly and made to fit comfortably next to Europe and Asia. This is evidence that at one point all of these continents were once joined up.

Evidence! See? Evidence that was obvious and true. The continents all fit together, and you can still see how they did after they drifted apart. It took about 200 million years: according to the same site, Pangea existed 240 million years ago, and it began to break apart 40 million years into its existence. But however long it took, it followed a logical rule and you can see it right there—right there.

My interest in geology began and ended about there. I took a geology class in college thinking it would get me out of having to take biology. It bored me silly. Then my advisor, who didn’t suffer fools lightly, told me there was no way in hell I was graduating without that biology class, so I had napped through that whole semester of geology for nothing. And then it turned out that I really grokked the biology class; it was one of my favorite classes out of my whole seven-year college career. Cells did certain things. You could count on them not to go off and do different things. (You see? Rules. About cells, about required college courses. Rules are good.)

I occasionally will read something interesting that slightly and briefly perks up my interest in geology, usually having to do with the age or makeup of our planet or, by extension, the neighborhood it lives in. How archeologists figure out how old a civilization is based on the layers of earth around the artifacts. If and how people moved around based on land masses. Why they decided Pluto wasn’t a planet. How the continents used to be joined as a thing called Pangea (see above). That sort of thing.

My latest case of momentarily lifting my head off the geology-classroom desk came after reading a thing about earth’s oceans. Specifically, that we didn’t have any at one time.

What what what? But what about all those endangered creatures? How the ocean covers the majority of our planet? Those wild and crazy and fascinating sea bottom creatures? Ahab’s whale? The 95 percent of the oceans we have yet to explore? What about all those undersea episodes of National Geographic and Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom” and “Sea Hunt”?

It’s obvious if you take a nanosecond to think about it. Earth used to be hot. Hot hot hot. This information isn’t going to stop any presses. But I never thought about the consequences of that. As History Facts notes,

For the first billion or so years of the planet’s existence, the surface was simply too hot for water to be anything but vapor. Around 3.8 billion years ago, the temperature finally dropped below water’s boiling point of 212 degrees Fahrenheit, and the vapor turned into rain.

Pangea’s 200 million-year-old crawl seems like child’s play compared with the time it took for that steam to start dropping onto our thirsty lands. And once it did, boy did it ever. It rained for centuries, giving Noah plenty of time to round up everybody and count them off by twos before he had to launch that ark. I guess that included single-celled microbes, because they were the first living things to pop up in the ocean about 3.5 billion years ago.

Actually, it turns out that how that water got to earth—what I called “rain” above—is a topic of debate among scientists. (Sigh.)  According to a PBS site,

One theory is that volcanic activity expelled water vapor and other gases from the planet’s interior, where it already existed. Another suggests that icy comets deposited water when they crashed into the early planet. The reality could be a combination of these theories, plus one other that involves the major collision event that is believed to have created the moon.

I kinda like that last theory: it drops a little poetry into the mix. It’s the plot thickener in the rom-com about the Earth’s one great love affair, complete with the steamy scene when she finally, er, gets together with that Mars-like hunk of a guy and—boom. Enter beautiful baby moon. It’s a modern story, so the guy, it turns out, has a roving eye and goes careening off into obscurity, but Earth and her child stay connected forever. (I said I thought too much; I never said I wasn’t a romantic.)

The BBC backs me up, too. It posits this notion in an online article headlined “The formation of the Moon brought water to Earth,” claiming that “Theia, the Mars-sized planet which collided with the Earth and led to the formation of the Moon, came from the outer Solar System.”

Theia. Another pretty name that makes me has happy as does Pangea. (I will note, however, that this quote confirms a point I made in a recent post about commas, in which I noted that the Brits disobey the rules about comma uses with “that” vs. “which” all the time. (Or rather, as I said there, “All. The. Time.”)

If you’d like to go full-on nerd with this topic, you can read the abstract of this research article from Nature Astronomy, which I am happy to say also supports the “Mars-wannabe having sex with Earth who then gave birth to the moon” version. My simpleton translation of the academic thesis: things that weren’t yet planets and were somewhere between the size of Mars and the moon hit the earth and splatted it with bits of carbon, which probably was the source of our water and the little life-bits that formed in it.

So, there you have it. Love conquered all. Or at least, a highly anthropomorphized version describing how a schmear of the universe’s arbitrary madness congealed into something that didn’t use to be here but now is: water. It fills our oceans and our bodies, and it is the basis for Life in our not (yet)-too-hot, not (yet)-too-cold third planet from the sun. As the bankrupt toy store used to note, Oceans R Us.

Want more science related to the ocean? The one’s about salt, and it’s explained by the McGarrigle Sisters.

Lagniappe: Here is a random observation from the Australian Museum that I find counter intuitive. “We are shorter, lighter, and smaller boned than our ancestors were 100,000 years ago. The decrease has been gradual but has been most noticeable in the last 10,000 years.” The site adds that this has slightly reversed in the past few centuries—we’re getting taller again. Please proffer theories.