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Reflections from Author Deborah Cramer

Seeing the Sea Around You

When radio talk show hosts interview me about “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World,” the companion book to the Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, they often ask the same questions. Whether the show is based in a big city or small town, in the Midwest or the deep South, in the mountains or at the edge of a lake, interviewers wonder why the ocean matters.

I live on a salt marsh at the edge of the ocean where, when the wind blows in the right direction, I can smell the salt spray, and where time is marked by ebbing and flowing tides. In “Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage,” my first book about the ocean, I explored the meaning of the sea in our lives. In “Smithsonian Ocean,” I considered the question again, this time including a visual perspective: The book is illustrated with some of the world’s most stunning marine photography.

Spawning horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay. ©Frans Lanting, Minden Pictures, from "Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World"

Photography can powerfully express scientific truth. The sea is dark and, for most people, inaccessible; elegant images make the water immediate and personal. Seeing firsthand through the book how words and imagery combine to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts, I began working with scientists, marine educators, photographers and artist Matthew Belanger to create a website that would enhance the message of the book and further respond to the radio interviewers asking why the sea is important. Like the book, the site seaaroundyou.com weaves beautiful imagery with hard science. Embodying science and spirit, truth and beauty, the site invites people to explore how all life depends on the sea, even if you live far from the breaking waves.

The sea is all around us, even in the land we walk. My home in Gloucester, Massachusetts, is built on granite bedrock—rock that was formed millions of years ago off the coast of what is now Africa, when an ancient ocean basin closed. The fertile soil of the Midwest, America’s breadbasket, contains sea floor from an ocean that has long since drained away. Fossils of horseshoe crabs found in inland Canada, far away from the sea, bring to life abstract ideas of continental drift and an Earth continuously recycling itself. We cannot live without horseshoe crabs. Their blue blood contains a substance that detects toxic bacteria on IV lines and other medical devices, protecting us from potentially fatal infections.

The sea nourishes and sustains us every minute of every day. Fresh water raining onto continents means the difference between feast and famine in Africa’s Sahel, determines whether there will be water shortages in California or, as was the case this year, severe spring flooding in the Northeast. Fresh water, on which civilization depends, is evaporated from the ocean. A photo of Lake Superior on the “Sea Around You” site is so close it seems you can almost touch the water. The Great Lakes, one of the world’s largest fresh water reservoirs, contain 90 percent of the United States’ fresh water, yet each year they are replenished by water evaporated from the Gulf of Mexico and adjacent Atlantic Ocean.

Sugarloaf Cove in Schroeder, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. ©CK Sandberg 2009 from The Sea Around You

The sea is always with us, in the air we breathe, the buildings we live in, the oil and gas that power our cars and some of our finest sculpture. The marble in Michelangelo’s “David” was once a limestone reef in the ocean. Ocean waters not only provide fish to eat but also redistribute heat and cold across the planet, softening what would otherwise be a harsh world, inhospitable to the life we know.

Now, though, we hold its life-giving waters in our hands. Thousands of research papers describe global warming and its consequences. A Richard Olsenius photograph from “Smithsonian Ocean” brings the message home, to the heart. In the photograph, taken in the Northwest Passage, where summer sea ice is melting at a rate far faster than we anticipated, a cluster of speckled murre eggs rest gently on the ice, a bit of which has melted, seeming to leave the eggs in a small, shallow pool. The ice, melt water and eggs beautifully evoke peril, fragility, endurance, possibility and hope—peril for the many animals threatened with extinction from the melting ice and hope that we will join together to restore the ocean to health and wholeness.

©2001 Shawn G. Henry Deborah Cramer, author of “Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage” and “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World,” is a visiting scholar at MIT’s Earth System Initiative. Explore the myriad ways the sea is always with us, both in “Smithsonian Ocean” and at the interactive website www.seaaroundyou.com, where you can contribute your own stories of how our lives depend on the sea to the site. Watch a video about the book called “We Need the Sea and the Sea Needs Us,” with music written by three-time Grammy nominee Michael Moss. Listen to the American Public Media interview with Cramer on Dick Gordon and The Story, “Soul of Water.”