CHAPTER 1
First There Was the Waters

The great mystery in the history of Earth is how did life come to be? The first tantalizing clue appears early in the opening lines of the Book of Genesis in the Bible. Shlomo Yitzchaki, also known as Rashi, was a renowned French rabbi of the eleventh century, whose commentary on the Talmud remains an authoritative interpretation of biblical script. The biblical account of the Creation, notes Rashi, begins with the startling admission that first there were the waters, which preceded God’s creation of heaven and earth.1 Genesis leads off with a passage that suggests that in the beginning the Earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.2

God then parted the primordial waters, creating heaven and earth and day and night, separating land from the oceans, and populating the Earth with every living creature. His last and most prized creations were Adam and Eve, made in God’s image, and fashioned from the dust of the Earth. To be fair to historical accounts, the Genesis story of the waters existing before the Creation was not a lone rider. The earlier Babylonian civilization tells a similar story of creation. Other creation stories from around the world follow along the same lines. The ancient stories of primordial waters are recently gaining interest, as scientists begin to unwrap the secrets of the formation and evolution of the universe and our own solar system and planet and to look at the role water plays in the unfolding of the cosmos.

These narratives of the Earth’s beginnings, which place the waters before the Creation, have taken on existential importance because of the tumultuous changes taking place in the Earth’s hydrosphere. While global warming, resulting from the industrial emissions of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide from the burning of fossil fuels, affects all four of the Earth’s primary spheres – the hydrosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere – its biggest impact is on the Earth’s hydrosphere. The Earth’s ecosystems, which have developed over a mild-weather regime during the Holocene era of the past 11,000 years, are collapsing in real time with the onslaught of climate change and the rewilding of the waters, taking the planet into the sixth extinction of life on Earth. (The last time the Earth experienced a mass extinction of life was 65 million years ago.)

It’s no wonder the scientific community is in a frantic search to understand the intimate workings of the Earth’s hydrosphere and its impact on the lithosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere, in order to better adapt to the changing ocean currents and the Gulf Stream; the effects of the melting of the last remnants of the previous Ice Age on land and sea; the disruption and shifting of the Earth’s tectonic plates; the unleashing of earthquakes emanating from the Earth’s mantle; and the sharp increase in potential eruptions from thousands of previously dormant volcanoes.

If there were any doubt as to the overwhelming agency of the waters in directing the planet, consider the scientific findings that show that the way the waters are distributed alters the very axis of the Earth – its tilt.3 And that’s exactly what has been happening since the 1990s on our planet. The reason is that the warming of the planet from climate change is quickly melting the last remaining glaciers and ice sheets of the Pleistocene in the Arctic region. The massive volume of water released is spreading across the oceans and altering the way the weight of the planet is distributed, and changing the planet’s spin on its axis.4

New research has also found that the recent pumping of groundwater for agriculture to feed a growing population, which now tops eight billion people, is also contributing to the way the waters are distributed – “enough to make the planet’s axis shift.” In India in 2010 the population pumped 92 trillion gallons of water from underneath the ground. While the change in the tilt of the Earth occasioned by human-induced climate change is only likely to slightly “alter the length of the day by a millisecond or so over time,” it’s enough to be awed by the agency of the waters and their impact on the planet.5

The question that scientists are asking is where did the primordial waters come from and how are they constituted? Astronomers have long entertained the notion that water is ever present across the universe, and journeyed to a newly formed Earth 3.9 billion years ago by the heavy bombardment of comets composed mainly of ice. New studies, however, favor a second complementary source of the waters – leaching from molten rock deep under the surface of the Earth.6 Recent findings also suggest that the ancient Earth may have been a water world without continents, reinforcing the biblical description of the primordial waters that preceded God’s creation of land.7

Although the scientific community has yet to fully decipher the connection between the waters and the evolution of life on Earth, it’s a fact that every species is comprised primarily of water from the hydrosphere. All of this takes us back to Adam in the Garden of Eden, who was long thought to have been fashioned from the dust of the Earth. Actually, water makes up much of the composition of sperm, and the human body is gestated in water in the womb. In some organisms, upward of 90% of their body weight comes from water and, in humans, water makes up approximately 60% of an adult body.8 The heart is about 73% water, the lungs are 83% water, the skin is 64% water, the muscles and kidneys are each 79% water, and the bones are 31% water.9 Plasma, the pale-yellow concoction that transports blood cells, enzymes, nutrients, and hormones, is 90% water.10

Water plays an essential role in managing the intimate aspects of living systems. The list of particulars is impressive. Water is:

A vital nutrient in the life of every cell [and] acts first as a building material. It regulates our internal body temperature by sweating and respiration. The carbohydrates and proteins that our bodies use as food are metabolized and transported by water in the bloodstream. [Water] assists in flushing waste mainly through urination. [Water] acts as a shock absorber for [the] brain, spinal cord, and fetus. [It] forms saliva [and] lubricates joints.11

Water is flowing in and out of our bodies every twenty-four hours. In this sense, our semi-permeable open systems bring fresh water from the Earth’s hydrosphere into our very being to perform life functions, after which it is returned to the hydrosphere. If there’s a case to be made that the human body – and all other living creatures – is more like a pattern of fluid activity than a fixed structure and operates as a dissipative system feeding off energy and excreting entropic waste, rather than a closed mechanism importing energy to secure its own autonomy, the cycling and recycling of H2O is an appropriate point of departure.

Every human being knows intuitively that water is life. We can go without food for up to three weeks, but we can only go without water for a week or so on average before the risk of perishing. But now, the hydrological cycle is convulsing in ways that we struggle to grasp, changing the dynamic of all of the other Earth spheres and the prospect of the survival of our species and fellow creatures. We’ve been there before.

Déjà Vu and the Second Deluge

The very beginning of human recollection in history, as told by peoples everywhere, is the story of the great flood that engulfed the Earth. While Western civilization tells of the great flood rained down by Yahweh that swallowed all of life, with the exception of Noah and his family and a male and female from each species taken aboard his ark, others recount their own tales of a great flood and survival of the Creation. In recent years, the scientific community has uncovered evidence of catastrophic floods in various regions of the world with the melting of the last Ice Age. In Eurasia, North America, and elsewhere, giant ice-dammed lakes melted, unleashing massive glacial floods, and once-frozen rivers spilled over their banks onto adjacent lands, taking creatures to their deaths. The devastation caused by the melting ice sheets burrowed into the collective psyche of our ancient ancestors and was the first shared historic memory passed on orally and later with the advent of script to present times.

Now, eleven millennia later, the hydrosphere is rebelling once again in the throes of global warming of the planet. Scientists are warning us that half of the species on Earth are threatened with extinction within the next eighty years.12 These are species, many of whom have inhabited the Earth for millions of years. Our scientists are engaged in a heated debate as to what has precipitated the current extinction event. Most place the blame on the fossil fuel-based Industrial Age and the spewing of massive amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere, leading to a warming of the climate – with ample evidence in the geological record to back up the claims. Others argue that the journey to extinction began as far back as the formation of the first great hydraulic civilizations in the Mediterranean, North Africa, India, China, and elsewhere starting around 4000 BCE.

For 95% of the history of Homo sapiens, our...