The Blue Frontier

And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be

Borne, like thy bubbles, onward; from a boy

I wantoned with thy breakers, -- they to me

Were a delight; and if the freshening sea

Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear.

-- Lord Byron, 1818

Catch a wave and you're sitting on top of the world.

-- The Beach Boys, 1963

Back in 1890, just a year after the Oklahoma Land Rush, the US Census Bureau ended a key chapter in American history by declaring the nation's frontier closed. But on March 10, 1983 President Ronald Reagan, in one of the most significant and least noted acts of his administration, opened up 3.4 million square nautical miles of new territory, extending US sovereignty over a wet frontier six times the size of the Louisiana Purchase and 30 percent larger than the entire land-base of the United States -- an oceanic domain that stretches from New England's Georges Bank to beyond the outer reefs of Guam, from Dutch Harbor, Alaska to St. Croix, Virgin Islands.

But unlike our last frontier, the creation of this new blue one, our Exclusive Economic Zone (or EEZ), as Reagan called it, has failed to spark the public imagination, to inspire grand plans and visions or even to resolve the ongoing competition and struggle over our nation's maritime resources. That conflict, however, could lead either to the protection and sustainable use of America's greatest natural treasure or condemn our oceans to a final industrial onslaught of destruction.

But it's best we start with the given and the known about this, our final physical frontier. The seas cover 71 percent of the earth's surface, giving our ocean planet its blue marble appearance. While the tropical rain forests have been called the lungs of the world, the oceans actually absorb far greater amounts of carbon dioxide. Microscopic phytoplankton in the top layer of the sea act as a biological pump extracting some 2.5 billion tons of organic carbon out of the atmosphere annually (replacing it with 70 percent of the life-giving oxygen we need to survive). The top two feet of sea water contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere. Scientists who recently have come to recognize ocean currents as key to the creation of climate, clouds and weather still don't know enough about the internal workings of the sea (or have the historic records) to fully incorporate the ocean's thermodynamics into computer models of global warming. More is known about the dark side of the moon than about the depths of the oceans.

Until just over 20 years ago, photosynthesis of carbon dioxide by plankton and terrestrial plants was thought to be the basis of all organic life. Back then, in 1977, scientists aboard a deep-diving submarine off the Galapagos Islands discovered sulfurous hot water vents 8,000 feet below the surface of the sea colonized by giant tube worms, clams, white crabs and other animals that contain sulfur-burning bacteria that provide an alternative basis for sustaining life. Now NASA scientists believe similar "chemosynthetic" life-forms might exist around volcanic deep-ocean vents beneath the icy crust of the Jupiter moon Europa.

For millions of years the ocean has maintained a fecundity of life unmatched on land, an enthralling variety of creatures and wealth of protein that has in the last half century jumped from a 20 to a 90 million metric ton annual harvest for human consumption (about 16 percent of the animal protein we consume). This biomass is equal in weight to more than 900 fully armed aircraft carriers being dredged up from the world's oceans every year (as opposed to the dozen US carriers that actually sail the seas). With the technologies provided by the military, including radar, sonar, improved navigation and communications systems, satellite surveillance, stronger marine engines, nylon for netting and strengthened steel and fiberglass hulls, the world's fishing fleets have been waging a highly efficient market-driven war of extermination on a growing list of fish species and marine creatures.