As we stand here in the Scilly Isles, surrounded by water, the timeless inscription chiselled onto a rock on Holy Island, Northumberland, resonates with this beach: “Out of the sea a heart beats of stone”. Our heart of granite, softened by white sand and brightened with wild flowers, breathes the south-westerly winds. It beats with the tides and the Gulf Stream flows through its veins, part of a great circulatory system of interconnected ocean currents transporting heat and nutrients around the world. It takes one thousand years for a water particle to make a complete journey through this global system and return to where we are now.

While ocean currents transport water, tides transport energy. Right now that energy is flowing around the Atlantic Ocean in the form of a colossal wave with high tide at its peak. After passing the Scilly Isles the energy that forms high tide travels to Iceland, Greenland, North America, North Africa and Europe. It then returns here twelve hours later and repeats the cycle without missing a beat, connecting us with communities around the Atlantic regardless of culture or climate. From the Inuit of Greenland to the Berbers of the Sahara, we all share the energy of the Atlantic tide wave. And this wave does not work in isolation, it is part of a network of tide waves that join like cogs in a great machine, high tides merging seamlessly throughout the world’s oceans.

Tides, winds and currents are set in motion by the earth orbiting on its axis at an angle of 23.5 degrees. This perpetual spinning creates a climate of constant change; day to night, spring to summer, high to low. But this change is not linear – it is circular. It follows a cycle, a path that makes a loop and returns to the start, just like the peak of the Atlantic tide wave. Each cycle is unique and the time it takes to make a circuit varies. Tides repeat themselves once a day. Currents transport water around the world once a millenia. And every several thousand years polar ice melts and pours into the ocean, rising sea levels. This is the cycle we are in now.

Three thousand years ago Phoenician traders sailed from the Mediterranean and stood where we are today. But their view would have been very different; instead of looking out over water they were above a valley that rose up to hills that make the islands opposite us. In those days these were not a collection of isles, but a single island whose valleys were flooded by rising sea levels, creating the isles we see today. And now that cycle is repeating, this time accelerated by man-made global warming. The difference now is that by looking back at the cycles of the past we can predict what will happen in the future, and we are better equipped to adapt to this dynamic stage in the cycles of our oceans.