The ocean is bigger than you. It was here before you, before any of your early mammal ancestors were shedding fur on land, and it will be here when you're gone. It's really big, and we ocean people know that makes it hard for you to wrap you head around the fact that anything you do could affect it. That anything bad at all could happen to 70 percent of the earth. But today, let's try and stetch our minds, shall we? Just a little.

Today there's news of a sea clam that was 405 years old when it was dredged up from the coast of Iceland. That puts its birthday in 1602, when the Dutch East India trade company was chartered and just before the death of Queen Elizabeth the first. That's older than the 100+ yo rockfish we go on about in the Pacific, where a few of our ichthyologists have been known to recommend: "never eat anything older than your grandmother." 405 years is a long time ago. But it's not the oldest thing in the sea. That honor belongs to corals, with reefs that live on the order of thousands of years. 

Then there's the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" which even the man who's studied it for the last decade calls a problem so large "it boggles the mind." It's ten days away from the nearest port, and while the patch is large, its components are tiny. If it takes you twenty minutes to get to work, imagine that the whole time--on the train, on the sidewalk, driving in your car--you're passing through a constant rain of tiny plastic pieces. The patch is bigger than that, and it's not the only one in the sea. 

For both the clam and the garbage patch, persistence is a matter of small, constant steps, which aggregate into a larger achievement: a really old clam, or an enormous soup of waste. It's part of the magic of the ocean that through currents and gyres and sheer tenacity it can transform the tiniest particles into something much greater, for better or for worse. Which is another way to say that your tiny actions can and do play a role in what happens in the sea, every day, as you add another growth ring to your shell.