During this summer, like last year’s, it’s not just Earth’s cities and countrysides that are swelteringly hot. The oceans, which cover 70% of the planet, are too. Science writer and essayist David Wallace-Wells puts that into perspective: More than 90 percent of all the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse effect goes into the oceans, and while climate-conscious humans may regard this as a lucky break for life on land, the math implies a different and less narcissistic emphasis: that the planet’s water, home also to a majority of its life, has absorbed nine times as much global warming as the world above the surface we know so well — and worry over so much. (“How Ocean Warming Is Warping the World,” The New York Times, June 26, 2024) Not only have we humans now changed our terrestrial dwelling spaces, we also seem to have permanently altered Earth’s exceedingly rare aquatic envelope. According to physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski in "The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works," humans “are collectively responsible for about 2.7 metric gigatons of life going missing from the seas — which are, after all, the only known oceans of water anywhere in the universe and the primal source of all known biology.”