Star of Water

Hajin. As most Korean naming goes, my name is comprised of two Chinese characters: “Ha” and “Jin”. “Ha” means water, and “Jin” means star. Together, they make “star of water,” the very nickname of our planet Earth. My parents had bought my name from some small naming center for a hundred dollars, but to me, those two words were priceless—they were my definition and guide.

The Earth is indeed a star of water: the ocean covers 70% of Earth, constituting 90% of habitable spaces in the planet, and sustaining a massive biodiversity. It holds endless schools of fish, propagating sound waves that move across whole oceans to other continents. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry marvels in his autobiographical novel “Wind, Sand and Stars,” “you(water) are not a necessity of life: you are life.”

Many people find outer space to be the epitome of mysteries. Extraterrestrial beings and exoplanets have spurred the imagination of humanity as evinced by its numerous film adaptions, novellas, and even government spending. However, in our very home Earth lies the greatest mystery of all.  Modern science may seem technologically advanced and all-knowing, but only 5% of the ocean—there is only one ocean, since all “oceans” are essentially connected—has been explored by humans. In fact, humans have landed on the moon before reaching the bottom of the ocean.

The ocean has long been the object of my fascination. The testaments of nature preached by Discovery Channel and Planet Earth made me come to believe that the ocean was where I belonged.

Try sticking your head in the ocean, or even a swimming pool, and the ocean returns nothing but silence. Under the dynamics of great waves and storms, the deep ocean seems eerily calm and dead, engulfing everything and trapping them into its depth. However, hidden in the shadows are volcanic explosions, landslides, earthquakes, and powerful internal waves. Sight obscured and sound buffered and covered by a great volume of the most chemically marvelous substance on Earth: water.

Thanks to my love, our family often traveled to islands and sea coasts. We would spend summers swimming, snorkeling, surfing, and boating. The water was a space of three dimension. On land, we are confined to the plane of z=f(x,y)=0. gravity steals away the z-axis of our motions. We are free, however, in water, where buoyancy repeals the chains of gravity. Training in swimming pools is great, but to swim in the sea is something wholly different. Mix swimming with real life aquarium tour, and it feels like you are an explorer of National Geographic yourself: snorkeling awed me in that a small patch of rocks in the floor sustain such a diverse ecosystem, surfing taught me how that pretty coral floor broke waves, breaking higher than its depth… Ranging from turbulence at scales of millimeters and seconds to global circulations at scales of thousands of kilometers and centuries or longer, the ocean’s dynamics works together in a massive system with its elegance flow and balance.

The ocean’s vastness is breathtaking, and its depth is intangible to my imagination. But whenever I taste the salt of the sprinkling drops of ocean spitted by the waves, whenever the mineral wind hits my long black hair, disheveling it, I feel so much alive. As an ocean explorer and research scientist, I long to unravel the secrets that move the ocean splendor, and hopefully, help preserve the few pristine ocean environments left.