9 May: Mother Ocean Day

Mother Ocean Day is the second Sunday in May. A day to celebrate the beauty and wonder of the ocean.

1. While we envisage the ocean as being made up of five oceans (The Arctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Southern/Antarctic) and a plethora of seas, gulfs, straits and so on, they're actually all interconnected and make up one big ocean known as The World Ocean. The World Ocean is also collectively known as just "the sea". The term "Seven Seas", which dates back to Sumerian times, divides the two largest, the Pacific and Atlantic, into two, creating the North and South Atlantic and the North and South Pacific.
2. The word Ocean comes from Oceanus, the oldest of the Titans in Greek mythology, who was seen as the personification of the sea.
3. 71% of the surface of the Earth is covered in seawater. That's 361,000,000 km2 or 139,000,000 square miles. The ocean contains 97% of Earth's water and 94% of its living species. More than 70% of the Oxygen we breathe is produced by marine plants, mostly algae. Yet only about 5% of it has been explored and many of the living species remain a mystery too. According to the World Register of Marine Species there are about 240,470 accepted species living in the ocean, but this is believed to be only a tiny proportion of them. New marine species are being discovered every day.
4. You may know that the deepest part of the ocean is the Mariana Trench, located in the Pacific Ocean near the Northern Mariana Islands. Its maximum depth has been estimated as 10,971 meters/35,994 feet (plus or minus 11 meters). The deepest part of it is called Challenger Deep, after the British naval vessel Challenger II, which surveyed the trench in 1951. Not many people have been down there. Less, in fact, than have been to the Moon. One of the people who has been down there is the film director, James Cameron. It's extremely inhospitable down there. The pressure of the Water would be the equivalent of having 50 jumbo jets piled on top of you, it's pitch dark because light cannot penetrate that far down and the water, thanks to hydrothermal vents in the sea floor, can reach 400º Celsius (750º Fahrenheit). The intense pressure is what stops it from boiling away.
5. The most remote place in the Ocean is located in the South Pacific. It's called Point Nemo (Latin for "no-one"), and is about 1,600 kilometres from any land at all and around 2,700 kilometres from the nearest inhabited land. In fact, the nearest people to it are the astronauts in the International Space Station, when it passes overhead at an orbit of no more than 258 miles/416km. You may not find people there very often, but there is still human rubbish – space agencies use it as a dumping ground, and it's estimated that over a hundred decommissioned spacecraft are lying beneath the surface.
6. Which brings us to shipwrecks. There are 3 million shipwrecks in the ocean, according to UNESCO. Between them, they contain more artifacts and treasure than all the world's museums. Over 60 billion dollars worth, according to one estimate. Not only that, but the ocean contains enough diluted Gold for everyone on the planet to have 9lbs of it. Its concentration is only a few parts per trillion. The ocean floor has undissolved gold embedded in it, but it's not cost-effective to mine it.
7. Earth’s longest chain of mountains isn't the Andes. It's the Mid-Ocean Ridge, which is almost entirely beneath the ocean, and stretches 65,000 kilometres. Yet, it's said, we know the mountain ranges of Venus and Mars better than we know this one. The largest living structure is also in the ocean – the Great Barrier Reef. Measuring around 2,600km, which can be seen from space.
8. There are rivers and lakes and even waterfalls under the sea. This happens when salt water and hydrogen sulphide combine, making some of the water denser. Temperature differences in the water can create waterfalls. The tallest waterfall on land is Angel Falls in Venezuela which has a drop of over 3,200 feet, but under the sea is the Denmark Strait Cataract, located between Greenland and Iceland with a drop of 11,500 feet, and a flow rate 50,000 times that of Niagara Falls.
9. Why is the ocean Blue? Water absorbs the Red and Orange part of the spectrum and reflects the blue, so it's the blue that hits our eyes. Because blue wavelengths penetrate much deeper than some other wavelengths, the deeper you go in the ocean, the "bluer" it gets. In case you're wondering, a glass of water isn't blue because you need a heck of a lot of molecules to reflect enough blue light to make it look blue, and a glass of water simply doesn't have enough.
10. The largest of the oceans is the Pacific. It was named by Magellan who named it after the Latin Tepre Pacificum, meaning “peaceful sea”, since it was calm when he first saw it. At its widest point, from Indonesia to Colombia, the Pacific Ocean is more than five times the diameter of the moon. The area of the Pacific is 59 million square miles and there are about 25,000 islands.

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