DR JUN.-3

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                                                            Article

As often as I can, I make my way to the beach. Usually, I am there to swim, sometimes just to walk along the cliffs. Either way, I go because the ocean reveals a different way of being, one where time is not measured with a clock, but instead can be found in the movement of the clouds overhead, the ebb and flow of the tide, the steady pulse of the surf. The notion that the ocean’s immensity contains other kinds of scale and temporality has a long history. The writer Romain Rolland, a friend of Sigmund Freud, coined the term ‘oceanic feeling’ to describe the sensation of boundlessness and unity he believed was the source of religious awe. It does not seem a coincidence that, when the science writer John McPhee sought a term to evoke the almost unthinkable span of geological eras, he chose the marine metaphor of ‘deep’ time. The English words ‘time’ and ‘tide’ even share a common root. But the ocean’s rhythms offer more than a glimpse of the infinite. Thinking about – or with – the ocean can help connect us to the great cycles that sustain life on Earth and the pulse of living being and presence that surrounds us. More importantly, the conceptions of time and temporality contained in the ocean provide powerful new ways of approaching the interconnected social and environmental crises that are overtaking our planet.

As the movement of the tides and the surf makes clear, time inheres in the ocean’s cycles. Like the tides, some of these rhythms are driven by Earth’s movement: every night, as darkness falls across the oceans, a great wave of life ascends from the mesopelagic to feed and hunt in surface waters, only to descend once more at dawn. Known as the diel migration, and comprising an astonishing diversity of species ranging from zooplankton to deadly Humboldt squid and strange creatures such as billowing larvaceans, this daily dance is the single largest movement of life on the planet, and plays a vital role not just in the carbon cycle but also in ocean mixing.

While its metronome is slower, the movement of Earth around the Sun also regulates the timing of the great blooms of phytoplankton that spread through southern and northern waters each spring. These explosions of diatoms provide food for an impossible profusion of zooplankton that ranges from tiny copepods to larval fish and crustaceans, underpinning the ocean food web and the lifecycles of many species. In the frigid waters of the Southern Ocean, the lifecycle of the Antarctic krill also depends upon this annual blossoming of life. As the sea ice retreats in the spring, the krill emerge from their winter refuges to feed and form agglomerations so huge they can be seen from space. Meanwhile, on the Great Barrier Reef, billions of corals spawn over a night or two at Full Moon in late spring and early summer, expelling clouds of milky eggs and sperm that spread outwards on the currents to colonise new locations.

Woven through these great cycles are other, more intimate rhythms. On reefs and elsewhere that animals gather, fish and other species greet the rising of the Sun with a dawn chorus much like the one that takes place on land. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, one of the dominant sounds is sea urchins, or kina, grazing on the algae growing on the rocks – a sound like crackling flames. Whales, fish, birds and other animals move with the seasons too. Some of these, like the humpbacks that pass Sydney every year on their journey from the Antarctic to tropical waters and back, or the long, wandering paths of turtles and great white sharks, cover many thousands of kilometres. Others, such as the hemisphere-spanning flights of shearwaters and Arctic terns, are even longer.

Other animals are more local: every January, sea mullet leave Botany Bay/Gamay, and head up the Cooks River near my home to spawn. On days when the tide is especially low, they appear as a long line, one or two fish wide, that extends like a dark seam as far as the eye can see. And every November, the eels in the creeks and ponds upstream swim the other way, en route to the Coral Sea, where they gather to spawn and die. As with terrestrial animals, these rhythms are governed by environmental factors. But they are also regulated by biological clocks built into the animals themselves. Most of these internal chronometers are attuned to the same cycle of light and dark that governs human biology – the word ‘circadian’ is from the Latin circa (around) and dies (day) – or the phases of the Moon, but in the ocean some coastal animals run on a cycle that follows the 12.4-hour pulse of the tides.

While we tend to imagine time as something external – a phenomenon to be tracked with technologies such as watches and chronometers – the interplay between life’s internal clocks and the interlocking patterns of flux and change of the seasons, the tides, and night and day, reminds us that time doesn’t exist outside the world. Instead, it inheres within it, and within us. We carry time in our bodies, written into our cells, the very fabric of our being. Indeed, the notion of time as something separate is a recent invention, and not present in Indigenous or traditional cultures. In a discussion of the idea of time in the culture of the Yawuru People, whose Country lies on the coast of northwestern Australia, the anthropologist Sarah Yu observes that Yawuru has no word for ‘time’ as an abstract idea. Instead, time is understood through the seasons, a constant cycle that connects the Yawuru to Bugarrigarra (Creation time). As Yu writes, Yawuru life is governed by the patterns of ceremony and obligation embedded within this cycle.

Difficult Word Meanings

  • Temporality: The state of existing within or having some relationship with time.

  • Oceanic feeling: A sensation of eternity and limitlessness often associated with mystic experience.

  • Mesopelagic: A mid-depth ocean layer between 200-1,000 meters where light begins to fade.

  • Diel migration: Daily movement of ocean organisms from deep waters to the surface and back.

  • Phytoplankton: Microscopic marine plants that perform photosynthesis.

  • Diatoms: A major group of microalgae and one of the most common types of phytoplankton.

  • Crustaceans: Aquatic arthropods such as crabs, lobsters, and shrimp.

  • Chronometers: Precision instruments for measuring time, especially in navigation.

  • Bugarrigarra: Yawuru concept for the eternal time of Creation.


  • Word Count: 975

  • Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12

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