The following was kindly contributed by Russell Odell

The oceans, like outer space, is filled with many mysteries. The US government spends 4,000 times more to study outer space than it does to study the oceans. There is no food in outer space but the world takes over $80 million in food from the ocean annually.

Of the world's surface area of 197 million square miles, 139.5 million square miles are covered by the oceans. One cubic mile of ocean water is estimated to weigh 151 million tons and there are about 330 million cubic miles of sea water. We have to guess how old the oceans are. The best educated guess is 550 million years.

In the book The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau, Vol. 1 page 10, Cousteau writes, "Every drop of water on earth when the earth was formed remains on earth today." The waters have been recycled and recycled through millions of years. If you look closely at Nature, you will find that Nature recycles everything. The world is a big recycling planet.

If all the ice fields of the world were to melt, the oceans would rise about 100 feet. This would flood high buildings to about the tenth floor. However, the water would not reach to cover Mt. McKinley, Mt. Everest or Mt. Ararat, the traditional resting place of Noah's Ark.

The average depth of all the oceans is only 2.5 miles. The biggest and deepest is the Pacific. It covers 64,183,000 square miles. We can place all the earth's land areas of 57.5 million square miles in the area of the Pacific and still have six million square miles of the Pacific left over for a giant swimming pool. If we could compress the land areas of the world into a ball, it would be covered by sea water 1.5 miles deep. Off the coast of Guam the depth of the Marianas Trench goes down to 36,201 feet below sea level. This is 7,173 feet deeper than Mt. Everest is high.

On the ocean floor are vast plains called the Abyssal Plains that are larger and flatter than any plains on our continents. There are also mountains, crevices and huge canyons that dwarf the Grand Canyons of Arizona. One such canyon is 60 miles off New York's harbor called the Hudson Canyon named after New York's Hudson River. (The river was named after Henry Hudson who discovered it in 1609.) The Canyon slopes down from the coastline to 8,000 feet then drops to 16,500 feet to the floor of the Sohm Abyssal Plain. From this floor rises the Caryn Peak, a volcanic pinnacle called a sea mountain that is five times higher than New York's Empire State Building.

The Shom Abyssal Plain turns south and connects to the Hatteras Abyssal Plain, making a curve around a group of under water mountains called the Bermuda Rise that is 12,000 feet below the ocean's surface. One high peak is above the surface of the ocean. We know it as the Island of Bermuda, 690 miles southeast of New York City. It is one of more than 300 such peaks belonging to this underwater mountain chain. No one knows when Bermuda was discovered. It has appeared on maps as La Bermuda since 1511.

The ocean's underwater chain gives a new twist to where the world's tallest mountain is located, measuring from its base on the ocean floor to its peak. For this we go to the Hawaiian Islands.

The Hawaiian Islands are the tops of volcanic mountains that have risen from the floor of the ocean on a mountain chain called the Hawaiian Ridge. Only the eight tallest peaks of this chain rise above the surface of the ocean. All the volcanoes are quiet except those on the island of Hawaii. Water around the islands is about 3.5 miles deep.

The island called Hawaii is also called the Orchid Island because more orchids are grown there than anywhere else in the United States. The main occupations of this island are the production of sugar and coffee, growing orchids and other rare flowers and cattle raising. There are 264 cattle ranches covering nearly 1,000,000 acres of pasture.

The Island of Hawaii, largest of the eight Hawaiian Islands, was gradually built up by five volcanoes beginning over a million years ago from a crack in the seafloor

The Kilauea Crater (Pu'u O'o) has been erupting almost continuously since 1938. It begins 18,000 feet below sea level and continues 4, 090 feet above sea level. It is the most active volcano in the world, discharging more lava than any other volcano.

Mauna Kea is a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaii. It is actually the tallest mountain on earth measuring from its base. It is 18,000 feet below sea level and rises 13,796 feet above sea level for a grand total of 31,796 feet (hree-quarters of a mile more than the height of Mt. Everest). Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level but Hawaii has the tallest mountain on earth. The top of this extinct volcano is the home of the world's largest telescope ( larger than Mt. Palomar's).

The saltiest water in the world is in the Red Sea (that is actually a lake) where the high atmospheric temperatures causes rapid evaporation. Its salt content is 40 parts per thousand. The saltiest ocean in the world is the Atlantic. Along the Atlantic coast the salinity ranges from 33 parts per thousand off Cape Cod to about 36 off the coast of Florida.

The saltiest part of the Atlantic is an area of about two million square miles south of Bermuda called the Sargasso Sea. The only sea in the world completely surrounded by an ocean. Its salinity content is a bit below that of the Red Sea. The average salinity of all the oceans is about 3.49 parts per thousand.

Over 50 of all the known elements in the world can be found in the sea. In 1950, Rachel L. Carson reported that a cubic mile of sea water contained $93,000,000 in gold and $8,500,000 in silver. Due to today's inflation, these amounts can be multiplied somewhat.

The Atlantic is only about one half as big as the Pacific, but because of the shifting of the tectonic plates (continental plates) the Atlantic is getting wider and the Pacific is becoming more narrow. The Pacific, on average, is 1,500 feet deeper.

The Polar oceans are the least salty because they are being diluted by rain, snow and melting ice.

In the oceans live about 40,000 species of mollusks such as oysters, clams and snails; nearly the same number of crustacean species such as crabs, lobsters, and shrimp--over 22,000 species of marine fish and mammals and over 8,000 species of marine plants. Thus you can readily understand why one fifth of the animal species, including man, live on land. To carry it a step further, we can say, the oceans are home to more than 250,000 species of living things from the smallest to the largest on earth. Exclusive of the insects (of which there are some 450,000 described species) four-fifths of all the species on earth--live in the ocean .

There are only four oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian and the Arctic. Contrary to what we occasionally read in the newspapers and hear on TV, there is no Antarctic Ocean. The southern tips of the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans are sometimes referred to as the Antarctic Ocean just to give a location point to an area of the world under discussion.