Story
Katha
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Folktales
Bhagavad Gita

Our planet has the wrong name. Our ascendants named it Earth, after finding land all around them, but if they had known what was earth really, they would have named it Ocean. The total area covered by water is 70.8 per cent.

There is no other planet like Earth in the entire Solar System - the nearest planet to sun - Mercury, has no free water at all. It is so small that it lacks sufficient gravitational force to hold atmosphere or gases such as water vapor. If ever these gases existed on this planet, it must have evaporated into the space leaving it dry and lifeless as the moon.

Venus - is the second nearest planet to the sun. It is large enough to hold gases with its gravitational forces. It has an atmosphere and a dense layer of white clouds which completely covers it surface. It is believed they consist of dry dust, suspended in a combination of gases largely made up of carbon dioxide with some nitrogen. Only a trace of water vapor has ever been detected in Venus atmosphere.

Then comes our planet Earth. And next to Earth i.e. forth planet of our Solar System is Mars. It is farthest out from sun. It has a very thin layer of atmosphere and also a small amount of surface water. Icy patches come and go on its poles like a thin frost at certain seasons of Martian year. This tiny film of water may possibly support some low form of life, but there is nothing on Mars resembling an Ocean. Otherwise Mars is the main centre of attraction for the space studies, for its atmosphere and if it have any life form on it.

The planet that lies beyond Mars - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune - are all too cold to have ocean, might be they have lot of water in form of ice. Saturn's three rings are believed to consist of throng of ice - covered particles, but none of the ice around it can become liquid. Even in the area where the sun reaches, the surface temperature on these outer planets range from 200° below zero. And as for the tiny outer most planet, Pluto, little is known about it and it is also too far and too cold to have a sea.

The Earth's Oceans are unique in the sun's family of planets. They do exist because the earth has a surface temperature in which water remains a liquid - between 32° Fahrenheit (below which, under ordinary conditions it freezes) and 212° Fahrenheit (above which, it becomes a gas).

It seems that water - liquid water have been designed expressly to make the world hospitable to life. Water has an unusual property of storing heat. As a result, the ocean act as a great heat reservoirs, moderating the high temperature of summer and cold of winter. Unlike most liquids, which contract when they solidify, water expands by 9% when it freezes. That is why, ice floats instead of sinking. The ice is thus accessible to the sun's rays, which limit its spread and depths of cold polar seas remains unfrozen, enabling the creatures that live in them to survive.

Water can dissolve more substances than any other liquid known. No life could exist on earth for a moment if water did not have this capability. Living organisms, big or small carry on the business of life by amazing variety of chemical reactions, many of which occur only when water is present to dissolve the reacting substances and bring their molecules together. Water forms part of many chemical compounds found in living tissues. 70% of human body is water. All the living creatures need water - which comes ultimately from the oceans. The Oceans - shaper of the world's surface, moderator of climate and cradle of life is unbelievably large.

Conventions divide it into 4 oceans: The Pacific, the Indian, the Atlantic and the Arctic. The size of the Pacific is equal to the size of other three oceans combined together. These oceans along with their fringing gulfs and smaller seas form an interconnected system, estimating 6x1050 water molecules circulating endlessly.

The sea contains 330 million cubic miles of water. The volume of all land above sea level is only one eighteenth as great. Land's tallest peak, 29,028 foot high Mount Everest, could be sunk without a trace in the ocean's greatest abyss, the 35,800 foot deep Mariana Trench in western Pacific. If all the dents and holes are removed and earth's surface is smoothed out, no land would show at all. The ocean would cover the entire globe to a depth of 12000 feet.

Sea water is a treasure of variety of salts and minerals in solution. Oxygen, carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the atmosphere are found dissolved in sea water. The dissolved oxygen is what the sea creatures breathe and dissolved carbon dioxide is used by green plants in the sea to produce food.

The average salinity of the sea water is about 3.5 per cent i.e. a cubic mile of sea water contains 166 million tons of salt, and the sea as a whole contains enough salt to cover the continents with a 500 feet thick layer. The salinity of the sea varies from place to place, but no where do the oceans approach the salinity of such inland seas as Great Salt Lake. The average salt content, 28 per cent, the land locked and concentrated remnant of an ancient sea that once covered much of western North America and left its salt behind.

Sea water is an important commercial source of common salt, magnesium metal, bromine and a number of other substances in wide industrial use. There are many materials found in the sea, which have no commercial value. The difficulty is low concentration. For instance, sea water contains gold at the rate of 38 pound per cubic mile. This is the equivalent of a mere .0004 of an ounce.

Where does all the salt in the sea comes from? Answer is that part of it has come from the breaking up of rocks by frost and erosion, the gradual wearing away of mountains, which releases locked in chemicals and permits them to be carried down to the ocean in solution by rain water. The rest has come from the rocks beneath the ocean bed. There has been a constant slow addition to the sea's alinity over hundreds of millions of years. There is an interesting way of surveying this: the body cells of animals including fish have a lower salt content than sea water has from this it is possible to conclude that sea water, at the times life first took shape, was less salty than it is now.

The depth of the sea is still barely known. For a long time there was no way of getting down to the bottom, or of learning what the depths were like without going down there. The deepest a free-swimming diver can go without underwater breathing gear is about 100 feet; with the development of breathing apparatus, skin divvers can now descend 200 feet or more and helmeted divers can descend 600 feet if they breathe a special mixture of gases. Modern submarines operate at depths of 600 feet.

We have learned about the ocean bottom in the way we have been learning about space - by inventing instruments and techniques to bring back information from places to which a man cannot easily go. One of the most unexpected and astonishing discovery is that there are differences between the land and the ocean areas that go down several hundred miles into the centre o of the earth. The land and sea make different "provinces". The continents are made of granitic rock, where as the bed of the deep ocean consist of heavier kind of rock, called basalt. The earth crust - the thin outermost layer - is far thinner under the sea than it is on the land. Yet another discovery under the ocean is the 40,000 mile submarine mountain range, by far the longest in the world, named Mid- Ocean Ridge. Another discovery is the mineral called "nodules", these are potato-sized lumps of maganese, cobalt, iron and nickel existing in incredible profusion on certain part of ocean floor. Nodules are formed through the passage of time, by a process not fully understood, around bits of clay, shark's teeth, or the ear bone of long-dead whales.

Ocean is a mystery with all these mysterious things underneath. No one can actually accurately guess at the number of individual organisms that live there. The life of the ocean is divided into distinct realms, each with its own group of creatures that feed upon each other and depend on earth other in different ways. There is first the tidal zone, where the earth and sea meet. Then comes the realm of the shallow seas around the continents, which goes down to about 500 feet. It is in these two zones that the vast majority of all marines' life occurs. The deep sea adds two regions, the zone of light and the zone of perpetual darkness. In the clear water of western Pacific light still be seen at a depth of 1000 feet. But for the practical purpose the light ends at about 600 feet. Below that there is too little light to support the growth of grass of sea-the tiny, single celled green plants whose ability to form sugar and starch with the aid of sunlight makes them the base of great food pyramids of the ocean.