The Ocean: Wild and Beautiful, Dangerous and Timeless

Growing up in the port city of Thessaloniki was a blessing, not only for its beauty and culture but also for its spectacular location by the sea. Greeks adore the sea, and their mythology, history, and folklore are full of sea tales, sea creatures, naval battles, poetry, and songs. The astonishingly beautiful islands and beaches are a major source of revenue today, attracting millions of tourists every year from everywhere in the world.

The sea has inspired great writers of literature since ancient times to the present. Captain Nemo’s enigmatic character fascinated millions of youngsters in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. In the novel, Captain Nemo’s underwater ship, the Nautilus, has many features of modern submarines that did not exist in Verne’s time.

Since ancient times, oceans and seas offered a means of trade, transport, and access to food and other resources. Oceans cover 71% of the planet’s surface and contain 97% of all its water. The five oceans are, in order of diminishing size: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. No life would exist on Earth without water to dissolve substances and enable chemical reactions that are necessary to develop living cells. We saw in another article of this series, that Stanley Miller in 1952 used water in the form of steam to produce organic from…