If you’ve followed this newsletter for a while, you’ll know I often write about loss, collapsing currents, melting ice, vanishing whales. So here’s something different. A reason, however small, to feel hopeful.
Scientists at the University of Southampton have been studying microscopic fossils of foraminifera, plankton that lived three million years ago during the Pliocene Epoch, a time when the planet was as warm as it’s expected to be later this century.
By analysing nitrogen trapped inside their shells, researchers discovered that even in that warmer world, the ocean’s nutrient cycles didn’t collapse. Upwelling continued. Productivity held. The plankton adapted.
It’s a reminder that the ocean is not fragile by nature. It’s resilient when given space to breathe.
This doesn’t excuse inaction, the Pliocene didn’t have plastics or factory trawlers, but it shows that life has endurance we often overlook.
The sea has been here before. It might just know how to find its balance again, if we let it.
