Though I have lived inland for many years, I identify quite closely as an ocean person. Many of my weekends as a kid were spent sculpting houses with the sand, and being thrown around by the waves. Later I got to spend time living on a boat and I knew that one day I would return. A Primevial Tide of Toxins makes me wonder if my plan to retire on a boat in 30 years will even be possible.
In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago.