Oceans cover about 70% of the Earth's surface. The
oceans contain roughly 97% of the Earth's water supply.
The oceans of Earth are unique
in our Solar
System. No other planet in our Solar System has liquid water (although recent
finds on Mars indicate that Mars may have had some
liquid water in the recent past). Life on Earth originated in the seas, and the
oceans continue to be home to an incredibly
diverse web of life.
Wind causes waves in the ocean. As the wind blows
over the surface of the ocean, it pushes on the water and transfers some of its
energy to the water. The water gets energy from the wind because of the
friction between air molecules and water molecules. It may seem that waves move
forward or horizontally, but they do not. They move up and down. You can see
this by watching a buoy in the water. It bobs up and down with waves rather
than moving from side to side.
The oceans are salty, which makes them unsuitable
for drinking. Most of the salt comes from minerals from rocks and soil that
have been washed from the land and carried into the oceans by rivers. The
minerals are mostly chloride and sodium, which combine to make salt. Most of
our table salt comes from the oceans.
The oceans of Earth serve many
functions, especially affecting the weather and temperature. They moderate the
Earth's temperature by absorbing incoming solar radiation (stored as heat
energy). The always-moving ocean currents distribute this heat energy around
the globe. This heats the land and air during winter and cools it during
summer.
With this information we can conclude that ocean is
the biggest part in our civilizations. We can see in the world, most of big
city located near the ocean. This happen because the ocean provide almost every
needs of human can be obtained from the ocean. Therefore, its importan to us to
understand about physical oceanography itself, wich discuss about physical properties
and dynamics of the ocean. The primary interests are the interaction of the ocean
witht heatmosphere, the oceanic heat budget, watermass formation, currents, and
coastal dynamics. Physical Oceanographyis considered by many to be a subdiscipline
of geophysics.
As an ocean
engineers we must uderstand how the ocean itself working and what propertys the
ocean itself has. In this course physical oceanography we can understand the
history about exploration that human has been done. Until this time many
exploration have been done to knowing every behavior of the ocean itself. Physical
oceanography focuses on describing and understanding the evolving patterns of
ocean circulation and fluid motion, along with the distribution of its
properties such as temperature, salinity and the concentration of dissolved
chemical elements and gases. The ocean as a dynamic fluid is studied at a wide
range of spatial scales, from the centimeter scales relevant to turbulent
microstructure through the many thousand kilometer scales of the ocean gyres
and global overturning circulation. Approaches include theory, direct
observation, and computer simulation. In the earlier, the research frequently
takes place in the context of important multidisciplinary issues including the
dynamics and predictability of global climate and the sustainability of human
use in coastal and estuarine regions.
As an ocean
engineers that will take a place on utilization the ocean for human benefit. We
must know what happen in the ocean itself so we can built the structurs that can
hold up the incident that caused by ocean phenomenoms itself. For example, we
will built a rig structure, to build this structure first we must know the
ocean wave, ocean tide, ocean current, salinity of the ocean and others. With study
and reseach intensively the physical oceanography we can also predict what
happen in the ocean in the future so we can design our long time megastructures.
