The Blue Machine

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book contains a lot of fun stories about the ocean and how the biosphere work. It is quite informative and nice to read.

🎨 Impressions

I liked it a lot. The way life has adapted to the salty ocean is quite astonishing.

Another thing I thought was quite interesting is the fact how nutrition is extremely important for wildlife in the ocean, and small things such as whale feces affect the entire eco-system.

✍️ My Top Quotes

• But before we reach for the grandest perspective of the Earth’s blue machine, we need to understand the major physical influences that make it work: temperature, salinity, density and spin.

• The Hawaiian Islands are shield volcanoes parked in a region of ocean that’s 4–5 kilometres deep.

• But the sun makes up 99.86 per cent of the total mass of the solar system, and although you could argue that 99 per cent of the variety is found in the planets, our solar system is really one massive nuclear reactor surrounded by spherical specks of dust that it can’t shake off.

• At the sun’s heart, 4 million tonnes of matter is converted into energy every single second as colossal temperatures and pressures force hydrogen atoms to fuse into helium atoms.

• Britain imported all that it could get, and by 1960 half of all fishmeal was being used as pig food. With the addition of industrial farming methods and antibiotics, farmers could grow more pigs more quickly, in less space and for less money.

• By the 1850s, half of Peru’s guano exports (200,000 tons of the stuff) ended up in Britain; it was the only manure British farmers bought in significant quantities.

• An adult human body contains around 200 grams of salt, and this isn’t a passive cargo.

• He was one of the founding members of the Royal Society (and its precursor the ‘Invisible College’), completely embodying its motto Nullius in verba, usually translated as ‘Take nobody’s word for it’.

• It had one overall conclusion: the amount of salt in seawater might vary from place to place, but the ratio of all the major components (sodium, chloride, magnesium, potassium, etc.) was always the same,fn24 in every ocean and at every depth.

• One litre of seawater contains 18.9 grams of chloride, 10.6 grams of sodium, 2.6 grams of sulphate, 1.3 grams of magnesium, 0.4 grams of calcium and 0.4 grams of potassium, along with tiny traces of lots of other elements.fn27

• At a molecular level, the turtle isn’t too different from us. The average salinity of her body is around a third that of seawater, and her reptilian kidneys can’t produce urine that has a higher salt concentration than her blood. Her body is a neat package of low-salinity life, and her cells will fail if her insides come anywhere near the salinity of the water in which she swims. Her leathery skin is the fortress that keeps the salt out.

• These whales feed on fish, and those fish are much less salty than the ocean. As they’re digested, their carbohydrate and fat release water, and the fish themselves contain useful water in their cells. So if a whale is careful, squeezing out the seawater that comes with each mouthful of fish before it swallows, it can get enough water from its food without taking in too much extra salt. We don’t yet know for certain, but it seems likely that whales don’t need to drink.

• A jellyfish is really just a small bucketful of ocean masquerading as life. It’s 96 per cent water, and most of the other 4 percent is salt, making the jellyfish as salty as the ocean. Less than 1 percent of the jellyfish is organic material and, therefore useful food.

• And so she must eat and eat and eat, stuffing herself with 80 percent of her own body weight in nutrient-poor jelly every single day. And the cost adds up – she takes in more than 10 kilos of salt every single day. How could any animal survive that without shrivelling up from the inside out?

• Leatherback tears are thick and viscous and almost twice as salty as the ocean. To keep eating without killing herself with salt, the turtle must cry around eight litres of tears every hour.

• The Pacific basin alone contains 52 percent of all the water on Earth, but there are no boundaries between the water that happens to be in that basin and the ocean anywhere else.

• The phenomenon of dead water occurs when the depth of the top layer, and the speed and size of the ship, hit a critical combination. When everything is just right (or just wrong, if you’re the one trying to go somewhere), the submerged wake generated in the water layers beneath the ship – the internal wave – becomes a fixed dip that sits right beneath the ship, and the ship must keep putting in the energy to drag that wave along. There isn’t much to see at the surface, but it takes a huge amount of energy to maintain the internal wave, which the ship must carry along like an unwelcome extra anchor.

• Many expeditions have returned to the Titanic since 1985, and the entire debris field has now been surveyed. The ship broke in half at the surface and sank in a single location, but the debris is spread over an area approximately 5 kilometres long and 8 kilometres wide. It seems likely that as the front half of the ship sank, its shape caused it to glide forwards, sending it away from the stern.

• As the tides move, they drag on the Earth, leaching energy away from the orbital system so that the Earth’s rotation slows by about 17 milliseconds each year, and the moon gets about 4 centimetres further away every year. This reduces the amount of energy in the Earth–moon system and provides the source of energy to move the tides.

• It’s estimated that 76 percent of species in the open ocean can generate their own light (known as bioluminescence), and we are only just starting to untangle the billions of flashes, flickers, pulses, patterns and distractions that are sent and received every second under the waves.

• Krill, which are plentiful in the Southern Ocean, generate light on their underside to help disguise them against the bright sky above.

• Whaling really took off in the 1950s and 1960s, when many tens of thousands of whales were slaughtered every year. And the whales certainly knew what was going on. Their cortisol, the stress hormone, follows almost exactly the same pattern as the number of whales caught, reaching a painfully high peak that coincides with the whaling peak in the 1960s.

• An old Spanish word for tortoise is galápago

• Fritz Haber was a German chemist who left a very complex legacy when he died in 1934. He unlocked the way to feed a ballooning human population when he invented a method for synthesizing ammonia and therefore artificial fertilizers (providing an alternative to the bird poo we considered in chapter 2). It’s estimated that this invention alone supports half the global population today.

• There are two broad categories of plankton: the phytoplankton, which are the sun-harvesters, and the zooplankton, which eat other organisms to survive. But because ocean life is complicated, there are plenty of organisms that do both, depending on the circumstances.

• Cyanobacteria like Prochlorococcus, the most abundant photosynthetic organism on Earth. These are tiny globules, too small to have a complex structure, and the smallest known organism that can photosynthesize.

• Put a Range Rover next to a grain of couscous and you have some idea of the range of plankton sizes.

• Recent research has confirmed that the basic rule of the ocean is that each time you go down the size scale by a factor of ten, the total biomass in that size category is the same, and there are just ten times as many individuals. This includes all forms of life: crustaceans, fish, marine mammals, bacteria, sea stars and everything else; you put each one in its size category, add it all up across the entire ocean, and the mass of life is the same in each category.

• Every time you see one big fish, it’s worth visualizing how large the biological foundation it rests on is: around eighteen times the mass of the fish you’re looking at.