DeLaney Rider
Period 1
10/2/2023
🌊Oceans~🌊
The moon? We know quite a bit about the moon. What about stars? We even know
how stars are created. How about the oceans on our very own planet Earth? Not as much as you
might think. We happen to know more about the dark side of the moon than our own oceans.
Isn’t that strange? We only have charted about 5% of the ocean. We should have an Earth-
Centric focus. Understanding our own planet is crucial to our environment and climate
challenges. Exploration has helped us understand Earth’s processes better and how it can
directly affect us. Ocean research also has immediate benefits. Ocean exploration has also
helped us with accuracy of weather predictions and is beneficial to protecting coastal
communities from natural disasters.
Oceans are also teeming with life. Isn't that what we are always looking for in space?
Our own earth has plenty of undiscovered species. Scientists estimate that 91 percent of ocean
species have not been classified. Studying this could improve our pharmacies here on earth.
According to “Mars Can Wait. Oceans Can’t”, “A recent Japanese study led to the discovery of
the drug eribulin which is useful in combating breast, colon, and urinary cancer.” Often, Ocean
exploration is more cost-effective than space exploration. This will allow for more frequent
research and discoveries. Another reason for charting out oceans instead of just leaving them
uncharted is that we need to figure out ways to fix pollution. About 40% of our oceans are
polluted and 80% of that is from us on the land. This means that we should take better care of
our land and the oceans. This will cause more time to explore.
Exploring the oceans can also help us fill the gaps in our knowledge and help us better
understand planetary scale processes, including marine dangers and plate tectonics. Marine
dangers include energy, mineral, and biological resources. Other large scale earth systems as well.
This means That we need to be careful, but we can also use the ocean as a great power source. In
addition to this, we could use that power to help clean and desalinate ocean water so that it is safe to
drink. In addition, our freshwater lakes are drying up. A few of these lakes are, Lake Mead, Alan
Nur, Lake Chad, Lake Erie, etc. Desalination should be our main priority when it comes to water
currently, considering how little we have left.
Oceans act like a conveyor belt for water transport such as precipitation. The way these
convection currents work is in and around the equator water heats up, and as this warmer water
moves towards the northern and southern poles while the colder water moves toward the equator.
It’s a constant cycle of water. Even if the water was as deep as the challengers deep (6.788 miles
deep by the way) this rule still goes into play. The reason these are working currents is because of
the global wind currents. Therefore, if the winds over the ocean stop, the currents will stop, causing
the world to heat up even more. This means we should explore sooner than space because our
planet could become inhabitable.
A common counter point is that space exploration allows us to prove or disprove scientific
theories about where we came from as a species. However, some socials would say that oceans are
much more important than space exploration. In exchange people believe that we should be able to
spend more money on our own planet. Space could be important in a few years, but space shouldn’t
be Earth’s main priority. Our own planet is facing its own problems. Our own problems should be
solved before we start more problems in other places. Otherwise, the children of the future might
not get to see the beautiful oceans.
We should not focus on what could be important a very long time from now in other parts
of space, when we could fix our own planet first. Our planet's issues are much more prominent than
what could be used as habitation millions of years from now. Ocean hazards like oil spills could
make it so that we couldn't explore areas because of the thick black substance bombarding the
water, resulting in less time to fix our oceans. Focusing on our planet's oceans will give greater
rewards for the immediate future. We must explore before it's too late.
