Remember when I promised to profile chemicals in the ocean as a New Year’s resolution? If not, here‘s my first in the series of one posts that resulted, reposted here as a reminder. As always, I encourage checking out the old comments. From now on, I still hope to give the series a second shot at life, so keep checking back for more installments of the series.
As my fellow fry-entists can attest, we know so little about the oceans that every deep sea expedition yields a handful of new species to describe, focus on saving one species may come at the demise of another, and people still won’t go swimming in some areas for fear Jaws will eat them. And that’s just a quick sampling of what we’ve written so far. The depth of our societal ignorance about the ocean and how it functions is enormous. Just as the fishermen of days gone by used to think that the sea offered God’s unlimited bounty, modern day people don’t seem to understand that the ocean isn’t an endlessly large dumping ground for all things undesired in our terrestrial lives. From trash to carbon dioxide to birth control pills, our oceans are the unfortunate downstream victims of human decisions. We don’t understand the impacts, sources, or even types of chemicals that are ending up flushed to the seas. One of my new year’s resolutions is to become more acquainted with the chemicals of the great big sea. Today’s profiled chemical: the unknown.