The humble yet powerful force of the world’s oceans have eternally shaped, molded, and determined the course of our entire planet’s growth and evolution ever since the very time that water first appeared on planet Earth – in everything from its geography, its climate, and the course of evolution that biological life-forms have taken as they began to flourish, thrive, and diversify throughout every corner of the globe so many eons prior to the present day. It was this mysteriously vast body of water that provided the building blocks for life to form, eventually giving rise to the single-celled organisms from which all existing life on the planet originates from, including us human beings.
It is through this profound, deeply-ingrained connection with ocean that we humans have derived a primal fixation and attraction to this awe-inspiringly majestic yet powerfully destructive force that permitted life forms on Earth to progress into sentient, self-conscious living beings. We owe our entire existence to the ocean, and this has instilled a natural sense of unity with it that our species has evolved to embody after millennia upon millennia of human evolution in habitats surrounded by the seas of the world.
Even for the youngest of developing minds, the ocean stands as a curiously intriguing and peculiar source of interest, which is evident in books, film, literature, poetry, and simple observation of the natural inclination that children have for innocent curiosity and an insatiable appetite to learn about the unknown. For most kids and adults (even in today’s day and age), it’s hard not to recall being fascinated by books and movies about the ocean growing up, or just being excited about the ocean in general – especially among people who grew up in coastal areas or went to the beach with their families on vacation quite often.
Although subjective in nature, it’s safe to assume that many of us have fond memories of the ocean in our childhoods – from actual experience and or from books, movies, art, and so on and so forth. A great example of an immersively captivating, ocean-themed kid’s book is “Oscar, the Mighty Crab” by renowned children’s book author Penny Higgins, who has written multiple critically-acclaimed children’s books throughout her career and has been writing poetry since the age of seven years old.
Perhaps it could also be due to the fact that the underwater landscape of the ocean’s mysterious habitat just looks so different in contrast to what the above-water world that we live in looks like. The colorful rainbow of alien-looking plant and animal life that varies by depth is like that of another world parallel to our own – compelling, mesmerizing, peculiar, and awe-inspiringly diverse in every aspect. It’s easy to tell why kids of all ages and even full-grown adults can get lost in the endlessly fascinating realm of the vastly-unexplored underwater world that lies beneath the surface of our own reality – a seemingly-divine force of creation and destruction capable of determining the entire planet’s fate along with every living organism that lives on it.
This is why some kids might wonder why scientists are so concerned about exploring outer space when humanity has only explored and charted roughly seven percent of the entire world’s oceans. Modern science has successfully taken photographic evidence of what a black hole looks like, engineered mind-bogglingly complex machines capable of deep-space exploration, and reached as far into the cosmos as physically possible – while a body of water here on our very own planet could be home to undiscovered wonders and exhilarating life forms just waiting to be discovered, and we haven’t even scratched the surface of what lies beyond the uncharted void of our own ocean’s depths.
In conclusion, we can make the connection that human children are naturally-inclined to have a deeply-ingrained attraction and fascination with the immersively intriguing yet mysteriously unknown wonders that the depths of the ocean are home to – and it’s obviously something that won’t be going away anytime soon. If you’re a kid, there’s almost no doubt that the wide open ocean (and the bafflingly perplexing question of what could be out there) allows for an immense degree of imagination to manifest in the curiosity of a young child, which may very well foster into an appreciation and respect for marine biology later on in life.
Alex Writes 