One ocean

As conflicts within and between countries increase, Helen Czerski’s book invites us to look deep into the singular system that shapes our planet. Pat Ganase introduces Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World, published in paperback by Penguin in 2024

However far from the sea you live, however near, you can be sure that the ocean has influenced your existence, and guides your being where you are. The ocean is vast and deep and still to be known. It gives weather energy and force.

Helen Czerski gives us a snapshot of the complex inner workings of the ocean which she calls the blue machine. Intricacies may include the life cycle of an eel, guano or poo, and in Czerski’s telling become important to know.

I retell a couple of her stories here in the hope they give an idea of the range and grand design she presents.

“My route into ocean physics wasn’t planned or expected. I grew up in Manchester in the north of England, where ‘ocean’ was considered a very exotic concept because what we had was the sea. Two seas, to be precise, the freezing cold North Sea to the east, and the blustery Irish Sea to the west.”

She’s a natural storyteller; here is information she is excited to share, paying tribute to earlier scientists and explorers.

Czerski’s approach is methodical, working from the transfer of energy, from the sun, to the ocean – water and salt – to the discovery of all other elements in the water, inert or organic, from the micro to the giant, which make the ocean something evolving, alive. Czerski the scientist discovers that in the ocean, biology and chemistry cannot be separated from physics. Here is the mystery and wonder of the medium which has birthed continents, mountains, bacteria and us.

Gaia, James Lovelock had called the complex, constantly adapting, resilient system that keeps planet Earth in balance for humans to thrive. Czerski calls her system Blue Machine, though she is neither blue – most of the ocean is dark – nor mechanical. The idea of our planet as a single, ever-changing but stable entity has guided us for a long time; it’s why and how we know that climate change is happening to the whole earth, everywhere, all the time and to everyone. Czerski wants us to know how much of it depends on the ocean.

“All of our fresh water is borrowed from the ocean – every cup of tea, every waterfall, 60 per cent of you and me, the most expensive champagne, your dog’s territorial markers and the snow covering the top of Everest.”

Our eyes are opened to all the connections from miniscule phytoplankton to grand movements – the Gulf Stream, the Humboldt current – and the blue whale.

Sound in the ocean

Sound in the ocean, she says, is like light on the land. The waters around the world are all connected with boundaries demarcated by changes in temperature, salinity or flow. In the 1940s it had been discovered that “the structure of the ocean engine – its distinctive layers with their varying temperatures and pressures – corrals sound creating acoustical barricades that enclose an efficient long-distance communication channel....the deepest notes can travel immense distances with almost no loss of signal along the way.”

In 1960, underwater explosions set off by American and Australian ships in Perth were picked up in Bermuda 19,820 km away.

“The sound had taken around three hours and 43 minutes to cross the southern Indian Ocean and then diagonally all the way across the Atlantic to reach Bermuda.”

In 1991, the Heard Island Feasibility Test mapped acoustical routes into the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Heard Island lies off Antarctica, “about halfway between the southern extremities of South Africa and Australia,” and was the point of origin of specific sounds. The time it took for the sounds transmitted to travel through the oceans could be used for a global ocean thermometer, to measure the rate of climate change.

“The physics of the ocean means that a whale, one single animal, can broadcast its message across a significant chunk of the planet.”

Evidence of whale stress was detected during the era when whales were hunted as the source of oil; and as a result of both world wars.

She takes deep dives to places where you’d think no life exists. But in every part of our ocean world, life has its way. Human life has expanded and taken advantage of resources on every coast of the ocean.

“In 1415, a group of mysterious and exotic creatures arrived at the court of Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, the powerful leader of the Chinese Ming Dynasty.” They were giraffes from Africa.

“They had been passengers on a giant fleet of 250 Chinese ships crewed by 27,000 men, known in history as the treasure ships. Over a period of 28 years, this armada brought to China an influence that stretched far beyond its borders and was dictated by where the ocean currents took them.”

The ships set out to carry and distribute treasure from China to the peoples they visited; the start of China’s gift diplomacy?

Beyond science and history, Czerski writes of people and the ocean, “The strong friendships which are common in the ocean science world are built on facing work like this together, on exploring both the ocean and our own relationship with it at the same time.”

Pacific island peoples

Do you know that there’s a view of planet Earth where all you see is the Pacific Ocean? Still, humans have found their way to most Pacific islands. The art of navigation by wind, current and stars has been kept alive by a few members of Polynesian cultures and recently reintroduced in Hawaii. Czerski was able to enter their fellowship.

The move to revive Hawaiian culture and traditional knowledge in the 1970s included the recovery of ocean-navigating skills. In 1976, the double-hulled canoe Hokule’a set out from Hawaii to Tahiti with a crew of 15 to follow an ancestral pathway across the vast ocean. Since then, navigators and sailors have been inducted in traditional knowledge, the skill of paying close attention to movements of wind and water and the stars.

Hokule’a and the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS) have inspired many adventures. The most recent is Moananuiakea (2022-2025), “a 43,000-nautical-miles, 47-month circumnavigation of the Pacific by traditional Polynesian voyaging canoes Hōkūle'a and Hikianalia and 400 crew to 36 countries and archipelagoes, nearly 100 indigenous territories, and 345 ports.”

The purpose is “to ignite a movement of ten million planetary navigators who will pursue critical and inspiring voyages to ensure a better future for the earth. We do so by developing young leaders and engaging communities around the world while amplifying the vital importance of our oceans, nature, science and indigenous wisdom.”

And yes, this was the inspiration for the film, Moana.

Czerski starts and ends with the poetry of the canoe off Hawaii. We are all in a canoe, she says, and we need teamwork to sail. We must work together to survive – in a canoe, a nation, or a rock in the universe orbiting a star whose energy keeps us evolving over billions of years. We are one, the human team, and ultimately intimately integrated into the living process that is the blue machine.

Most of all, Czerski’s odyssey is – as she intends – an expose of the marvels that exist in the ocean, the voyagers and passengers that move around the earth from Greenland to Antarctica, and in the deep Pacific. Here is information that we need – whether you live near the ocean or far from it – to understand and to love our ocean world.