Find Your Beach

Passion for me is synonymous with the ocean. It always has been. However, before starting this blog I almost shied away from what was actually in my heart to pick a topic with lesser appeal and possibly more easily recalled content. As this is our last post and I scroll through my blog, I am beyond at peace with my decision to take up my passion and share it with others, and I hope to have made a connection with ocean-lovers and landlocked people alike. I'd like to depart from this blog some final thoughts and a little bit of advice that I have come to live my life by.

Find your peace, and find your beach. I understand not everyone has a weird obsession with the ocean, not everyone craves sand between their toes and salt in their hair, but I think that passion in life is as vital as the air we breathe. Living for something and learning to love something is so important, regardless of what it is. A person, a place, a feeling, a smell. Anything. It has made a huge impact on my outlook and perspective to feel such a strong love, connection, and affinity towards the ocean. My entrancement by the sea from a young age has matured and nurtured a lot of my skills and puts a lot of life conflicts and situations in a context I can understand.

For one, the ocean has given me my people and my favorite days. When I think about family and life long friends, I think about the places I have been and the people I have been with that share the same passion. My "summer friends", I like to call them, that I grew up with at the beach, have become a piece of my heart and an extension of my family. 18 years of rolling around in the sand, surfing all  day, chasing sunsets, and causing havoc in our beachy city every summer has molded me and shaped me. While I only see my summer family 3 months out of the year, increasingly less and less as we all get older and busier, I know I have a lifelong confidates and best friends spread across the country at any given time. The most peculiar part about my summer family is our differences. Our differences in age, hometown, and interests. However, the one thing that strings us together into a loving crew is our passion, love, and gratefulness for the ocean and the days that allowed our paths to cross.

So, while the beach is my peace and where I feel at home, I encourage everyone to find your own "beach"; your own passion and your own place that makes you feel like you are on top of the world and also humbly small at the same time.

The Flow of the Oceans

Have you ever been to the beach and sat on the shore line and wondered how it all happened? How the tides drive the waves, and how they never cease? How some days the waves are bigger than others, and how sometimes the current is strong and angry, and other days it is smooth and weak? Did you ever think about the way these attributes of the ocean fit into a greater intricate picture of the way nature and the world works in cohesion with all the other aspects of nature and earthy processes around it? Or did you simply overlook the absolutely complexity and near-miraculous compilation of  nature's ways?

While it is for the most part common knowledge that the ocean has tides and currents, and that these tides and currents are constantly changing from strong to weak and high to low, most people do not understand why. 

Surface currents are the continuous and directed flow of water on the surface which are capable of propelling water thousands of miles, and submarine currents do much the same thing, only deep below the surface of the water. The ocean currents present in different geographical areas of the oceans have a largely significant impact on the climate of that particular area, and affect which regions are holistically temperate, cooler, or more tropical. The ocean currents also indicate and act as a reference point/ alarm clock for a multitude of marine creatures to carry out their life cycles by relocating. These currents have a large effect on the working of the ocean and the life which inhabits them. My favorite phenomenon with currents (is it weird to have a favorite current?) is the El Nino, which is a reversal of an ocean surface current strong enough to have a blatantly notable affect on climate changes, which can result in devastating storms and weather patterns. Most of the resent hurricanes and ones which have been engraved in your memory from the past manifest from an El Nino. 

Another aspect of motion in the ocean is the tides, which is perhaps even more attributed to the human eye onlooking the ocean than even the currents. The tides are a rising and falling of the surface of the ocean due to gravitational forces manifesting from the sun and the moon. According to NASA in 2007: "These changes in ocean surface level are known as tides and are evidence of the influence celestial bodies have on our planet. Without these external forces, the ocean's surface would simply exist as a geopotential surface or geoid, where the water is pulled by gravity without currents or tides." This strong gravitational fields surrounding the conceptual means of the moon and the sun have a huge affect on the rising and falling of the surface water of the ocean. The tides weaken the further away they are geographically from the sun and moon. Beccause of the liquidity of the ocean, the water is able to be easily moved by the gravitational forces 

 

Graphic showing currents: Currents and Tides