Seawater is the circulatory system of Gaia
In 1855, Walt Whitman penned the free verse,
“I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same….”
Later in Leaves of Grass, he extols the miraculous process by which the Earth is cleansed as we each return to her some day. But in those opening stanzas, he omitted mention of the sea, which, before there was even land, had written the recipe for our blood.
Our blood is saline like the sea for good reason. Andrew Schafer, past president of the American Society of Hematology, explains,
Blood can also be thought of as a private ocean, a recapitulation of what life was like for all the years we spent drifting as microscopic, single-celled organisms, taking up nutrients from sea water and then eliminating waste products back into sea water. Not only is blood mostly water, but the watery portion of blood, the plasma, has a concentration of salt and other ions that is remarkably similar to sea water.