Shanghai In The Epipelagic Layer

Everybody

Loves my baby

She gets high

Shanghai, the most populous city on Earth,
is about fourteen hundred miles to the west
of the deepest place, the Mariana Trench,
which at its deepest goes down about five miles.

Five miles is a long way down. If a villain
wanted, for instance, to kill the human race
the villain would not need to fill the ocean
all the way to its bottom, five miles, with oil.
A careful villain would only have to spread
enough oil mixed with dispersant chemicals
to disrupt the epipelagic layer.

Typically that’s just seven hundred feet deep.

That’s where plankton lives. The small plants use sunlight
to fix carbon, that is, remove the carbon
from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The people of Shanghai and the rest of us
might not notice if the Mariana Trench
was filled, down five miles, down in the dark, with oil.

But if enough oil and other chemicals
suppress the metabolism of the plants
in the thin, bright epipelagic layer,
the people of Shanghai and the rest of us
will notice the hot air is harder to breath
because smoke from the factories where they make
pretty Apple things and plain old computers
just kind of hangs around with no place to go.

It’s a good thing villains are just a device
writers and artists use for comic book fun.

The people of Shanghai and the rest of us
can breath easy knowing villains aren’t real.

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