Ocean Gets a Fresh Start Off Our Shores : Research shows this is where the water loads up with a renewed supply of life-giving oxygen for long voyages around the world.

Scientists have pulled something exciting from the ocean floor near Santa Cruz Island. It’s evidence stretching from prehistory to the present showing that Ventura beach strollers are looking at the site where all the world’s ocean water begins to renew its oxygen content as it flows from here to Greenland and back.

The evidence was announced at an American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco this month. It also provides a record of atmospheric changes over many centuries.

“It’s the lungs of the planet,” explains Dr. James Kennett, director of the Marine Science Institute at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The results of his team’s exploratory core-drilling into the ocean floor have been greeted by the scientific community as “the hottest thing going in the earth sciences,” he said.

Science has known for years that the ocean water flows in a regular pattern south from Greenland, around South America, up to the north Pacific and then turns south, nuzzling California as it sets forth in its journey back to the Atlantic.

At all times beneath the sea there is something moving, rather like the body’s circulatory system--where blood is pushed by the heart through the lungs for oxygenation. Now, it turns out, this moving flow of deep, cold water quite literally comes up for air near here. Kennett calls this phenomenon an “oceanic conveyor (that) upwells to the surface at the continental margin.”

The core that was fetched up near Santa Cruz Island looks like a 600-foot-long log. The log is made up of thousands of layers of sediment deposited over the eons. Scientists examine these layers of sea-floor history in much manner that dendrologists check the growth rings of ancient trees, to check both the age of trees and climatic conditions in the past.

Each layer of the sea-floor core is also evidence of the sediment formed by microscopic sea creatures.

These aquatic free-loaders arrive off our beach on the ebb and flow of the ocean, which they have used as a conveyor. But they abandon the conveyor when the oxygen it contains is gone.

However, beginning here, the ocean starts recharging its oxygen supply--a process that continues the whole while it travels back to the Atlantic. It’s kind of fun to think that something as big as the ocean comes here to get a fresh start.

But there’s more to the story.

In a manner of speaking, the sediment--the remains of the ocean’s microscopic travelers--layered under the sea off Santa Cruz Island, reveal whether conditions were hospitable or inhospitable for living things all over the planet throughout the centuries.

It seems that things have frequently and suddenly switched from good to bad and back again, “flickering,” as Kennett put it, between hot and cold, ice age and tropical climate, oceanic rising and falling, misery or prosperity for various organisms. When life is good--and warm--heavy deposits appear on the ocean floor. When it’s not--as during an ice age--deposits are thin.

“What we have found is that the ocean’s climate system is tightly linked, worldwide, to global atmospheric changes,” said Kennett, who went on to say that this ultra-sensitive climate system is linked to global warming.

At the recent Geophysical Union meeting, he was approached by other researchers from Europe and Asia who have been drilling into glaciers and sea bottoms for clues about the Earth’s history.

“They got evidence of the same mechanism,” he said, suggesting that changes in ocean temperature and the richness of the sediment aren’t caused by the ocean itself.

There have been hints for years that the climate can change quickly, Kennett said, “not in geologic time but in human time--a single generation’s life span.”

The insurance industry is probably not waiting for the final scientific word on this topic.

According to this month’s issue of the journal “Worldwatch,” recent violent weather changes--a possible companion of global warming--have cost the insurance industry too much money for comfort.

But, this weekend, while the green eyeshade set is working extra hours on its own version of Kennett’s story, I intend to take a beach stroll and reflect on my own--about being in the presence of Renewal.

Happy Holidays.