Hydrocosmos, abyssal currents & tears
On the need to establish respectful and reciprocal relationships with bodies of water (ours and others), in three acts: dance, cry, dive.
Act I
The Dance of Life’s Hydrologic Cycle
We name it Earth, but it is Water who covers 74.35% of our planet’s surface. The majority of that water (97%) are oceans, where life emerged around 3.5 billion years ago. It took much time for our ancestors to abandon the primordial seas and evolve a relationship with land. 359 million years ago, vertebrates left the water and began our deeply interlaced dance with lands and fresh water. We are intimately interconnected with the mere 3% of fresh water stored in the Earth’s underground and surface waterways.
Wherever we are, we are part of the transcendental dance of the hydrologic cycle danced by Earth, Moon and Sun.
The moon shapes the tides while the sun warms the ocean, who evaporates into clouds that rain fresh water on Earth. The rain runs to the underground, lakes and rivers and, eventually, finds its way back to the sea. In the complex in-betweens, water goes through civilizations and organisms: it is polluted, filtered, transformed, and transpired back into the atmosphere. Above tropical forests exist giant aerial rivers of clouds of botanical evapotranspiration!
Thus, the hydrologic cycle is not traveled by inanimate water, dissected H2O. It its Earth’s life as Hydrocosmos. An old, inter-being, collective dance. It reminds me of Maypole dances where European folk hold fabric threads connected to a central mast and dance around it, intertwining. Socio-ecological threads made of many colors and complexities, that are resilient and also fragile. Threads that get interlaced with abyssal currents, literally and in metaphor.
The ocean’s circulatory system is composed of flowing currents that move the global oceans from the surface to the deep and back up. This dance is led by waters of different density meeting to the sound of atmospheric temperature shifts. There are only two regions on the planet where ocean water dives from the surface to abyssal depths: the North Atlantic and close to Antarctica. The cold of these regions freezes great volumes of water forming icebergs, but the salt is not incorporated in the ice, it stays in the oceanic solution. This results in a local density increase: the water gets heavier and plummets into the depths. That abyssal water carries in itself the solar radiation and carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed at the surface and remains in the deep sea, traveling the currents, during centuries before emerging once more.
This long-term storage of heat and carbon makes the abyssal current the Earth’s temperature harmony system and our biggest ally in the moderation of global warming. But the tecnocapitalist humanity, largely forgotten of rhythm and ancestral musicality, drunk on oil and profit, has released in the last 30 years more than half of the total CO2 emitted since 1751 . In such a short period of time we have endangered a thousands of years old planetary harmony.
The CO2 we release into the atmosphere traps heat in the planet, melting icebergs and glaciers. The snowbreak dilutes the salty water causing local decreases in salinity and density, leading the water movement to halt and possibly colapsing the global circulation. If this was to happen in the North Atlantic, one of the (predictable) consequences would be the freezing of Western Europe while the rest of the world overheats further. While this scenario is unlikely to occur within this century, we hypothesize that Antartica’s abyssal waterfall (which sinks 250 trillions of tons of ocean water per year) may stop within 30 years, due to global warming.
The (predictable) consequences are not limited to the weather. Not only heat and carbon are transported by the abyssal current but also: nutrients, oxigen, minerals, soil, eggs, larvae and migrants of many species… the ocean currents are a flux of life that is interlaced with all habitats and habitants of Earth.
We have abandoned the epistemological Maypole dance and lost the rythms of complex and systemic thought. It is time to re-interlace and return to the place of relationship with the Earth’s metabolism as a whole. The place where the guiding song is sang by the waters, recorded in conchs we must lift to our collective ears. It is time to feel the bodies of water, human and more-than-human alike, and understand that the decay of respect, acountability and reciprocity that we inflict on one, we inflict on all.
When our evolutionary ancestors left the ocean, 359 million years ago, the threads linking us to the deep salt waters enlongated, but did not break.
Let us dance.
How many dances have we forgotten?
What abyssal currents howl for our care?
How can we honor, respect, and reciprocate the bodies of water that sustain us?
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This article was written in a Portuguese version for Vento e Água - Ritmos da Terra magazine, 46 2023
Dancing in gratitude for water sugestion: