Most people know that the surface of the earth is 70 per cent covered by water. So it comes as no surprise that you can’t just devote a mere 60 minutes to documenting why the heck there is that much water around, how it got here in the first place, and the weird and wonderful things that live in it.
The Nature of Things devotes four consecutive Thursdays to One Ocean, an excellent series which investigates this watery world, and there’s a nary a gilled Kevin Costner to sully it.
The first episode, naturally, is called “The Birth of an Ocean,” and delves back into our planet’s past to illustrate how oceans came to be, something I had never thought of. Experts such as palaeontologists Peter Ward and Ted Daeschler describe how, as the earth formed, the crushing force of the planet coming together pushed moisture out of rocks, where they puddled. Those ancient puddles cooled the planet from the outside in, and grew thanks to the atmosphere.
Ward travels to Shark Bay in Western Australia, where hundreds of underwater lumps called stromatolites – the remnants of bacterial plant life – turned those first oxygen-devoid oceans into oxygen-rich ones.
Daeschler picks up the tale from there, showing off fossils of an animal called a Tiktaalik, the first species to crawl out of the water and on to land. “We’re looking at an animal that’s really at the base of the branch of the tree of life that leads to all limbed animals, and we’re a limbed animal,” he explains.
Don’t be scared off by the thought of big, scientific words clogging up the stream of info One Oceans presents. It’s delivered in easy-to-understand ways using CGI, illustrations, and the experts present their findings in workaday language.
Next week’s instalment, “Footprints in the Sand,” explores man’s relationship with the ocean, “Mysteries of the Deep” spotlights the creepy things that live deep down in the dark, and “The Changing Sea” predicts what the world’s oceans may look like in the future now that humans have had the past 200 years to dump crap into it and the atmosphere.
One Ocean airs as part of The Nature of Things, Thursday, March 4, 11, 18 and 25 at 8 p.m. ET on CBC
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