Emily M’s Reviews > Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World > Status Update

"Earth's previous mass extinctions were catastrophic...but the timing may have been leisurely. The Great Dying of the Permian...when 90% of marine life disappeared, took place over 160,000 years...we humans...are accelerating the pace of extinction. Already a hundred times higher than before our arrival, it will become, if current trends continue, a thousand times greater in the next decades."

“For so long, we have believed the sea’s resources to be unlimited, erroneously equating immensity with immutability. From our home on dry land, we ate powerful enough to restructure marine food webs…to alter the chemistry and temperature of seawater.”

“The Permian catastrophe probably began with a volcanic eruption more immense than any humanity has witnessed…eruptions in Siberia may have lasted for one million years…The eruptions burned through…the world’s largest coal basin…During the Permian extinction, oxygen levels dropped to 12%…The combination - too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide and increasingly acidity - was disastrous.”

The fact that we have known that eels - a fish humans have eaten for centuries- breed in the Sargasso Sea since at least my lifetime, but still no one has yet observed the spawning, is kinda crazy.

“Ediacaran fossils…are found all over the world…The architecture of the leaflike quilted Charnia, the mysterious Tribrachidium, with it’s highly unusual three-part symmetry…were evolutionary roads not taken, way stations on a path never completed”

I mean…they were around for 30 million years, which is way more than WE can claim - but they ARE weird and fascinating compared to surviving lineages.

“Charles Darwin, hiking through the Andes, and finding shells in the continental divide, was awed. ‘Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist,’ he wrote, ‘ that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level crust of this earth’. From the sea comes land we call home.”

“There life emerged and evolved. The first living cell was born in the scalding waters of deep-sea hot springs…A nurturing sea gave rise to earth’s…first plant, first animal. We are, essentially, specialized fish.”
YES! Just like you can’t have a sensible evolutionary grouping called “dinosaurs” that excludes birds, a sensible evolutionary grouping called “fish” has to include land vertebrates!