Course Overview
The marine world is both majestic and fragile. Big, beautiful, powerful, life supporting, ancient and mysterious, the world’s waters are also delicate and vulnerable. The earth’s oceans and seas need protection by and from the planet’s dominating species. The oceans are thought to have been formed as a result of icy comet collisions with the Earth occurring from 4.5 to 3.9 billion years ago, forming steam which gravity condensed and pulled into depressions in the planet’s surface. The Earth’s major oceanic depressions form the Pacific, Indian, Atlantic, Southern and Arctic Oceans. These oceans are a thin film over the Earth’s surface, on average, only a few kilometres deep. Oceans and seas currently cover approximately 71% of the Earth’s surface, 360 million square kilometres. This thin layer of oceans forms about 90% of the Earth’s biosphere, by volume, and was the original source of life on Earth about four billion years ago. Oceans and seas contain the greatest amount of life by mass.
Learning Objectives
- Learning Objective No. 1;
- Learning Objective No. 2.