Water, water, everywhere …

The source of life for this planet,water is also the source of some of its most fundamental mysteries. It lurkswithin the cells of living organisms; it lies fused within the bonds of minerals.Bodies of water have cut the contours of our landscapes, allowing us ourshorelines, or quietly slipping away with them. Even as the oceans form ourhorizon line, their mists blur the precision in the boundary where the earthmeets sky.

Water has a way of evadingdescription. For something that surrounds us, constituting nearly every elementof our lives, let alone more than half of our own bodies, it remains as easyfor us to depict as it is to hold in closed fists. Words just don’t stick well towater. When pressed to try to describe it, our very best adjective – ‘wet’ – feelsvery dry indeed.

It is not only the written word thatstruggles to hold water. Hallowed painters from Turner to Kuinzdhi have beenpraised for their ability to replicate the play of light upon the waves, a featthat still dazzles us, all our advances in technology aside. Even with the aidof digital wizardry, liquid water has served as a holy grail for the graphicsworld. It is so notoriously difficult to render that ten years ago, when a newgaming console was unveiled to the public, the demonstration skipped theshoot-‘em-up battle scripts for a scenario guaranteed to set the audience’shearts racing: a rubber ducky, placidly afloat in a plugged-up, blue-tiledbathroom sink. The trail of ringlets rippling behind it may have sent the crowdin rapturous oohs and aahs, but the real pièce de résistance wasthe moment a clear plastic cup dipped down below the water line to fill itselfup, only to rise and pour the ‘water’ out again. The crowd went wild.

And yet, even as we struggle torepresent water, we live in a moment defined by it. Our world heaves in thebalance of water’s present and impending scarcity and its present and impendingexcess. As fresh deserts quake with drought, the sea is spitting up islands andswallowing them whole again, leaving only tiny, spaghetti-string leftovers,like the Palmyra Atoll.

If the ocean can be thought of as theEarth’s last true wilderness, then a place like Palmyra delineates itsfrontier, the point where the last vestiges of man’s authority and interferenceyield to the sea. Part of the Line Islands, and thus technically a U.S.territory, the uninhabited atoll is in effect subject only to the laws of the openwaters. A broken charm bracelet of over fifty small islets, sandbars andlagoons, Palmyra is home to coconut crabs, coral reefs and other such secretsof the deep. Six degrees above the Equator and smack dab in the middle of thePacific, the atoll lies 15,000 kilometers from the ruins of the ancient SilkRoad outpost that shares its name – Palmyra, ‘the city of palm trees.’ And yet,this breach of blue sea was christened not for the trading hub, but for the Palmyra, a ship that ran aground in itsshallows in 1802, while under the command of one Captain Sawle, a man whosedubious achievement of crashing his own vessel was ceremoniously hailed as a ‘discovery.’

The Palmyra was not the first American ship to graze the atoll’swaters. Four years earlier, Captain Edmund Fanning had encountered the island aftera bout of paranormal activity on board his ship, the Betsey. At the time, Fanning was en route to Macau, having justleft Más Afuera (literally, ‘father away’), the Chilean island now known as ‘AlexanderSelkirk Island,’ after the Scottish pirate – the ‘real’ Robinson Crusoe – whohad been forcibly marooned there in 1704 after publicly refusing to sailfurther on the battered Cinque Ports,a vessel he deemed unseaworthy (The ship would sink less than a month later,taking its remaining crew with it.)

Fanning’s near miss with Palmyraoccurred late one night in June 1798. The Betseywas breezing along its course, when the captain awoke to find he had beensleepwalking to the brig – once, twice, threetimes. In the last instance, Fanning appeared fully dressed, his somnambulentself eager for action. Certain this could be nothing short of an omen, heordered the ship to slow its speed until the morning. With the first light, thecrew could make out the softly shimmering shoals of what would later be knownas Palmyra, dead ahead. The captain’s premonition had spared the Betsey the fate that would be met bySawle’s vessel, but, perhaps in part due to these eerie circumstances, Fanningnever officially reported the island – despite having dutifully ‘discovered’two of the previously-claimed Washington Islands the week before. And so it wasthat Sawle got the credit, the atoll got its name, and the Betsey sailed on.

But the mysteries around Palmyra didnot end there. Fourteen years after Sawle’s arrival, the reefs claimed the Spanishpirate ship, the Esperanza – ‘Hope’ –which had been loaded with Incan gold (or, at least, so the story goes.) Theship had been badly damaged, either in combat with another boat or up againstthe shallows of the neighboring Kingsman Reef. In any case, after a year ofwaiting for rescue, the marooned crew buried their treasure in the sand and cannibalizedwhat was left of their ship, literally taking the last of their hope out to seaas makehift rafts. Only one man would survive, and even then, only just longenough to tell the tale of the Esperanza(though, notably, not long enough to reveal the precise location of thetreasure – that is, if it ever even existed. No one could blame a capturedpirate for borrowing from Scheherazade’s playbook.)

These three ships and their encounterswith Palmyra would give way to rumors of the various curses the atoll cast onthose who entered its waters. In this aspect, the atoll materialized as anembodiment of the threat of the open water. Perhaps rightfully so; in the threehundred years of its recorded history, Palmyra was the vanishing point for countlessships, planes, and, in the 1970s, even a globe-trotting American couple. Theprobable murder of the pair – a well-to-do Mr. and Mrs. Howell, up against amuch less kindly Gilligan – brought the island into America’s culturalconsciousness, first as a headline, and later as the true crime bestseller,cloyingly titled And the Sea Will Tell.(And perhaps it will, though just not everything; while it has unceremoniouslyspit out the wife’s scull, the sea has yet to divulge the whereabouts of theman’s body.) Palmyra is even more hostile to those who don’t disappear. Itslagoons are shark-infested, its sealife poisonous. While the atoll receives nearlyfour meters of rain a year, there is no fresh water amid its lagoons.

More than 5,000 kilometers from anycontinent, the Palmyra Atoll formed as chunks of reef around the lip of anunderwater volcano. In low tides, the atoll’s striking white shallows breachthe waterline, giving Palmyra the aerial appearance of a mangled pull tab froma can of beer. In high tide, the atoll’s surfaces sink almost entirely into thewater, save for a thin strand of palms, along the unnatural spine of an airstrip, left by the U.S. Navy during World War II. In the time in betweenFanning and the naval occupation, the atoll was bought, sold, annexed andinherited, but only rarely – and even then, only barely – inhabited. Itcurrently belongs to the Nature Conservancy, as one of the last examples of anisland habitat, as yet unmarred by man.

Adding to Palmyra’s mystery is its dubiousposition in relation to time. Just shy of the equator, the atoll has no seasons.Its geography situates it right in the spot where the International Date Line’sdelivers its mean right hook, punching its fist into what should be the pastand claiming it for the future. In short, if you were to sail 700 kilometers tothe northeast of Palmyra, you wouldfind yourself one hour ahead; if you were to sail 700 kilometers to the southeast, however, you would lose aday, traveling 23 hours ahead. This anomaly is the work of Kiribati, another ofthe Line Islands, which declared war on the date line after decades ofstruggling to maintain a nation where one half of the population was always aday behind (or ahead of) the other. Now Kiribati is exactly one day ahead ofHawaii, even as it lies due south of it. Palmyra and the other American-heldLine Islands were prevented from following suit, with the U.S. literallykeeping these islands in the past. They remain just outside the invisibleborder where an entire day drops into the sea. Palmyra’s only real time, then,is set by the tides.

In earlier times, Palmyra would bethe kind of stretch mapmakers might brand with the illustrated warning: “Herethere be dragons.” And while this cartographic quirk might have fallen out ofstandard usage, the convention lives on in the depths of online forums, whereshivers of delight take hold every time a nineteen foot squid emerges in aJapanese port: we were right, the dragonswere there the whole time. Indeed,what is possibly the quintessential story of the sea, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, springs from this samevisceral thirst to be proven right about all that we do not know in thesewaters.

For what we know of the ocean is itsmystery. Astronauts training in the deep sea – the closest thing we have toswashbucklers like Sawle and Fanning – find it as unknown as other planets,with species so utterly unexpected that they can only be called ‘alien.’ Hereinlies our central paradox: water – while responsible for every ounce of life onthis planet – is, in its essence, alien. Its atoms existed long before ourEarth. This means that in so much as we are water, we are also alien. The moleculesthat make up our bodies journeyed to this planet on voyages infinitely more mysteriousthan those of the Betsey or the Esperanza. Even the tiny fraction ofthat journey that can be readily observed – the fleeting presence of water onEarth – can not be readily explained. After all, in such proximity to the heatof the sun, surface water shouldn’t stand a chance. What water Venus might havehad is believed to have been largely spirited away by solar winds. Earth’soceans would be susceptible to the same fate, were it not for the planet’smagnetic fields, the push and pull of electric currents that act as a shield todeflect the winds from the surface. Mars once shared this same protection,until its core cooled, effectively pulling the plug on its magnetic shell: The charmèd water burnt away / A still andawful red.

But even this explanation does notaddress the question of where this water came from in the first place, nor itspreferred mode of transportation. Until recently, the prevailing theory heldthat water molecules had been ferried by meteors and comets, one smash at atime, the tiny shards of ice released upon impact. But for frozen splinters tofill 71% of the Earth’s surface would require a bombardment beyond even our CGI-enabledimaginations. Current fashion points to Jupiter temporarily swerving off hisorbit – something having caught his one monstrous eye – until Saturn managed topull him back out again. The force of this gravitational dalliance would havebeen enough to break up a potential ice giant in the making, explaining notonly the origin of water on Venus, Earth and Mars, but also the very existenceof such small planets, so perilously close to their own sun.

Support for this hypothesis is rooted in Jupiter’sice-encrusted moon, Europa, which, while smaller even thanthe Earth’s moon is estimated to have two to three times the water of theterrestrial oceans. In a brilliant coincidence, the home to the only other knownactive ocean in our solar system bears the name of a mythical maiden whose fatebelonged to the sea, having been carried off by the marauding god who gave hisname to the planet that now holds her in thrall. According to the myth, Europawas a lovely Phoenician princess, hailing from what is now present day Tyre. Havingspotted the girl while she was out frolicking on the shores, Jupiter resolvedto seduce her, choosing the less than obvious form of a glistening white bull. When,entranced by the animal’s beauty, Europa climbed upon its back, the bull doveheadlong into the water, swimming until they reached Crete. Jupiter then hadhis way with her in the very same cave where he used to hide from Saturn –again, the watchdog – when the future king of the sky was still a boy.

If in the myth, water separated Europafrom her home, her namesake moon exacts a kind of revenge, holding a saltyocean captive under a thick shell of ice. This saltwater sea is currently thelikeliest haven for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. What’s more, unlikethe icy shards borne by comets, the water on this faraway moon is believed tocarry the same chemical signature as Earth’s water. In other words, Europa couldhold the best potential for terrestrial life as well. If the mythologicalEuropa’s uprooting gave way to Western civilization, then this moon may be thekey for an even more dramatic departure.

This tale extends far beyond our ownself-interest. For if, as we have learned, the water molecules in our bodiesare older than our planet, then it is unfathomable that their adventures shouldbe contained within the limits of our language. These atoms may have travelledat speeds our earthly bodies – at least, in their current configurations – willnever know, visited planets we will not live to discover. Their journey doesnot end here. The Earth’s oceans may frame our horizon, but there are no suchbounds on water. Even Europa, with her thick crusted shell, can only hold waterfor so long.

And all the boards didshrink…