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Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

With every drop of water you drink, every breath you take, you're connected to the sea. No matter where on Earth you live. Most of the oxygen in the atmosphere is generated by the sea.

The oceans produce up to 70 percent of our oxygen, they shape our climate, and they support an American oceans economy larger than our nation's entire agriculture sector.

Like the ocean, land plants hold about three times as much carbon as the atmosphere. While oceans take many centuries to exchange this mass with the air, flora take only a few years.

The photosynthesis we see with plants is not very efficient. Algaes are more efficient.

Biological energy comes from the sun. Light energy harvested by photosynthesis in chloroplasts and phototropic bacteria becomes stored in carbohydrates and fats. This stored energy can be released by oxidative metabolism in the form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and used as fuel for other biological processes.

Ocean planets might be very common in the universe because water is very common in the low-temperature environments where planets form and evolve. This might be especially true for super-Earths, which can retain volatiles more easily thanks to their larger mass and surface gravity.

If you look at the ecological circuitry of this planet, the ways in which materials like carbon or sulfur or phosphorous or nitrogen get cycled in ways that makes them available for our biology, the organisms that do the heavy lifting are bacteria.

Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun's energy as heat.

By enriching the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere from its impoverished pre-industrial levels, human beings have increased the productivity of the entire biosphere - so much so that roughly one out of every seven living things on the planet owes its existence to the marvelous improvement in nature that humans have effected.