The ability of biological and physical oceanic systems to encode, store, and release information across a variety of timescales, from hourly to geological, impacting the future.

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the pangenome – all 20,000 or more genes carried collectively by members of a microbial species, when the core number they share may only be 5000. The different genes beyond that core represent adaptations to different environments – the memories of alternative possibilities, allowing them to flourish when conditions change.

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the cache of bones and genes, deep in the ocean – memories of lost ancestry from 400 years of the slave trade.

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the registration of light on waves in 19th century watercolors.

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the earliest physical, geological and geochemical processes in a global ocean that include hydrothermal systems, plate tectonics and subduction, resulting in the origin of organisms and viruses and their evolution into higher organisms. These earliest processes remain active in the world’s ocean retaining their memory of life’s origin, potential and fitness for the future.

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embodied in sea ice, which forms from seawater in one location, only to transfer the information it stores in its frozen architecture to a far-distant location where it ultimately melts – releasing the memories of its origins to influence a new home.

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the lost potential when pollutants interfere with the longstanding memory systems of life in the ocean

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the annual network of microbes in the sunlit surface ocean, recording like neurons the memories of past phytoplankton blooms that will enable the recycling of the next bloom.

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the forward movement of an initial mix of circular eddies in the ocean, whose direction is determined by the memory of their past routes, merging them into a more uniform and efficient flow.

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the lone whale that returns annually to the same feeding grounds, even if one year the table was spare, because long-term memory says the next year will present a feast again.

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the coral reef ecosystem, resilient in the face of the last big storm because it had already been battered by smaller ones, while the naïve reef succumbs for lack of memory.

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the shifting sand of the coastline, erasing memories of past formations and ecosystems while generating memories for the fitness of a new ecosystem alongshore.

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the 100-year rain storm that fell because the atmosphere remembered its contact with an upwelling ocean, delivering excessive moisture beyond its bounds.

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