With the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference just finishing I thought it was timely to bring up an old story I wrote in the days before Medium. Sylvia Alice Earle talks about the misconception that the oceans are too big to fail. With different issues coming to light in today’s world — be it the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, overfishing, the Pacific Trash Vortex, the previously mentioned climate change conference, or some other piece of news it would seem that this is not the case but I think a greater illustration of this fact is relating the size of the oceans to our planet in general. David Gallo, Director of Special Projects, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, MA came up with a simple illustration that everyone who calls this planet home should understand.
You might need to enlarge the photo above to really understand what you are seeing. The Earth is obvious. The first blue ball to the right of it is the total volume of the oceans of the Earth, and the tiny blue speck further to the right is the volume of all the freshwater on the planet. Now imagine if you had a basketball that represented the Earth and a cup of water proportional to the salt water volume. If your task was to spread that around the ball to model the oceans it would not be an easy task.
Now what do you think? When I originally wrote the story someone looked into the phrase ‘to big to fail’ to better understand Sylvia’s words. The first thing that comes to mind is the meaning associated with large institutions. That is, that they are too important to be allowed to fail. Though this idea would be nice when applied to the oceans of the Earth the intended meaning is that they seem so big in scale how could anything we do to them really change anything? In further translation, what both David and Sylvia are saying that the human effect on the oceans is much greater than anyone perceives. In other words, no, they are not too big to fail…and yes, freshwater might be even a bigger problem for the future as well…
(Originally posted on Medium)