Dr. Paul G. Falkowski
Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Rutgers University
The Once and Future Ocean
The ocean has been a feature of Earth's surface for at least 4 of the past 4.5 billion years and has provided the primary environment for the evolution of microbes that drive the biogeochemical cycles on Earth. Over this long period of time, the ocean has witnessed extreme changes, ranging from complete coverage with ice to extensive periods when there was no ice at all and from periods of extraordinary extinction of animal life to periods of dramatic evolutionary radiation of animals. Throughout all of Earth's history, the ocean has served as the primary backbone of life on the planet, and the core metabolic processes have been successfully transferred across vast stretches of geological time. Humans, in contrast, evolved only about 200,000 years ago and, in that short period of time, have come to outcompete and plunder many of Earth's living resources successfully. Over the past 100 years, in particular, we have increasingly altered the trophic structure of the ocean as well as its physical circulation and chemical properties. While human impacts will surely alter ecosystem functions, the core metabolism of the ocean will go on. Rather, ironically, humans are the fragile species that will lose capabilities of using the ocean as a source of food and novel molecules. Our future is intimately tied to that of the ocean. We have to begin viewing the ocean as a key component of the Earth system--one that we cannot live without.
