The Greatest Current 

There is something majestic and mesmerizing about the ocean and there is something dull and droning about a politician’s voice, so the combination of Barack Obama narrating Our Oceans is a bit awkward at first. But it works, it’s almost as if he were reading a bedtime story to his children. Only it’s better because the visual experience is so incredible.  

And the storytelling is superbly done. It’s witty and catchy, and you learn so much in short snippets, travelling around the five oceans (in five episodes) that envelope our blue planet Earth. What are the five oceans? Can you count them now on your fingers? It’s easy. You know them. You remember these certainly from your childhood geography classes…  

Everything is intertwined in the wonderful web of life that includes above all this largely unexplored “interconnected body of water that is our great ocean.”

There is the Pacific of course – the largest of all oceans – where a female humpback whale is looking for food for her 2-ton baby; then a pod of 40-ton males is chasing after the mother-baby duo to assure their spot first in line for the next breeding season. The chase scene is aerial, and these ocean beasts are in hot pursuit. It’s a great opening that pulls the viewer in immediately. 

“In the water, look, the arms of the whale are yellow, look!” cries your 6-year-old nephew pointing at the screen. 

Some 25,000 miles of dormant and active volcanoes, the great Ring of Fire, also surrounds the Pacific. Three-quarters of volcanic activity happens underwater. The activity of these volcanoes helped created the great ocean current that goes clockwise at a baffling 50 million tons of water per second down around the west coast of North America, across to southern Asia, up towards Japan and back around again.  

The ocean surface water is warming to unprecedented temperatures, causing disturbances to marine biodiversity: the bleaching of corals is the most publicized (80% loss in the Caribbean), but in the past 50 years, some Pacific shark populations have plummeted by 90% due to overfishing and lack of food. In the Atlantic, the great whales have migrated further north than ever before, venturing towards the Arctic Ocean in search of their cold-water prey. 

Raw, amusing, well-told, realistic, alarming, hopeful.

Did you know that the whale shark is the biggest fish and has the largest inner ear of any animal?  

This documentary is entertaining for children, and it is educational for adults. This is enhancing ocean literacy at its best for all ages. There are amusing cocktail tidbits and conversation-starters about penguins and ice fissures, underwater ice caverns, plankton, bioluminescence, krill and ice spiders, and so much more. Everything is intertwined in the wonderful web of life that includes above all this largely unexplored “interconnected body of water that is our great ocean.” 

Our Oceans is a series of survival stories, of how animals subsist and persist in the face of tremendous adversity, constantly in the search of some form of sustenance, constantly watching out for prey, protecting their own, enduring until there is nothing left and nowhere left to go. This is the story of natural resilience. Raw, amusing, well-told, realistic, alarming, hopeful. Everything is changing. And nature, too, will change, and more easily than humans. WWF Asia discovered 234 new species in the inland Greater Mekong region, morphs of previous species… Just imagine what is in the ocean.