To whom it may concern,

Hello, my name is Myles C. J. Olson, and I am a Grade 11 student attending Britannia Secondary School. My hobbies are photography, reading, gardening. I love to hang out with my friends and am always looking for opportunities to better myself.

I believe that the ocean literacy principle that I am most familiar with is principle 5, the fact that the ocean supports a great diversity of life and ecosystems. As a child, for hours on end, I would watch a great deal of documentaries about the ocean and all of its inhabitants with my grandmother. This instilled in me a great fascination of marine life, which has remained with me to this day. 

The principle that I know the least about is the third principle, that the ocean is a major influence on weather and climate. While I have always knew that it did, I've never considered why the ocean has an influence weather and climate, nor have I ever given myself the chance to investigate into the matter.

To start, oceans and mountains make up a large majority of the environment of our planet, and have quite the relationship. As exemplified by principle 3, the ocean is a prime factor in the behaviour of weather. Due to the nature of its behaviour, weather is a chief agent of erosion, especially in coastal areas, such as B.C. Due to them needing rise over mountains, clouds, through the act of condensation, release their rain onto the landscape below, hydrating organisms, creating water streams of various speeds and sizes, and ultimately eroding the land. The runoff then usually returns to the ocean, where water evaporates into clouds, which start the process all over again. This process rejuvenates the ecosystem and plays a vital role in sustaining the habitability of the land, allowing not only us, but other beings to continue to live on Earth. If this system were to somehow be interrupted or affected in a way that didn't allow it to function properly, unforeseen and potentially irreversible damage could be done to the environment, changing how we live forever. It is of the utmost importance that we as humans aid in the continuation of this process as we can.