In our earlier post, we saw how choosing TMOD themes can be made easy. I chose “Stories from Space” as my TMOD theme to present one aspect of the broader theme. Click here to read it.
Let us see another facet of this theme that I took upon in my next TMOD session.
AN OCEAN ODYSSEY
“We know more about the outer space than we do about the oceans within earth” – that is one of the most fanciest statement I could find to begin today’s theme. Weather its true or not – I will let you decide from two facts that I am going to mention
1) 12 people have been on moon but one 3 people have been to the bottom of marina trench – the deepest part of the ocean.
2) We have a more detailed and higher resolution map of the entire mars than of our ocean bed – less than 5% is in high resolution.
So what do you think, what do we know more, the oceans or the space?
But there is a very interesting reason behind this – exploring space is more easy and glamorous than exploring the oceans.
Glamorous obviously because it is beyond earth, there is the possibility of finding aliens.
Easy because – even with just a telescope, you can look billions of years in all directions in the space. On the contrary, average depth of ocean is 12500 ft. and sun light reaches only up to 330 ft. In other words more than 70% of the entire oceans have been dark since the beginning of time. Add to this immense pressure and the salty nature of the water. All of this means – if you are in space you can see a star bursting a billion kms. away with naked eye but if you are in ocean, the only way to see a ship wreck is to be just over the ship wreck plus point the torch in the right directions.
So to conclude while it’s true that we haven’t seen much of space to know every corner, we haven’t seen much of ocean as well and personally I will call it a tie.
All this seems complicated. Thankfully Toastmasters is not that complicated at all. For the new members as well as our guests, let me explain how a toastmaster’s meeting is conducted. The meeting is divided into three parts. The first part consists of prepared speeches, where members prepare for a speech in advance, get it mentored and deliver the same. The second part is the exciting Table Topic session where any one from the audience including the guest can come up and speak on a topic given by our Table Topic Master for 1 to 2 minute. And the final part is the most important evaluation section where our General Evaluator for the day will give a report card on the entire meeting – what went good and what went bad. On that note, let me invite our General Evaluator for the day TM Name.
Once the General Evaluator is done explaining his role, you may begin the prepared speech session. After this session is over, you may continue with the theme as under.
Thank you so much speakers for enriching us with your wonderful speeches. Well Toastmasters, you may not know but our oceans are also very rich too. There is incredible amount of gold in the ocean floor. If it was distributed amongst people of earth, each person would get roughly 4 kg of gold. Of course it is so scarcely distributed, that taking it out will not be economical even in the next century. But a very different type of riches also exist down there. According to the National Geographic, the ocean bed is home to more than 3 million shipwrecks alone beside innumerable numbers of aircrafts. And if you add all the precious paintings, jewels and artifacts these shipwrecks took with them to the bottom of the ocean, all the museums of earth, put together will fall short.
I am sure that astonished you. Let’s keep getting astonished as we step into the next session of our meeting, the Table Topic Session. Put your hands together for our Table Topic Master TM Name.
Once the Table Topic Session is over, you may continue with the theme as under.
That was indeed a wonderful session. Thank you TM Name.
Toastmasters, you may be surprised to know that the oceans have entire environment and life of their own. They have rivers, lakes and volcanoes within them and everything is XL out there. For ex, we know largest mountain is Everest from sea level but Mauna Kea in Pacific Ocean has a large part of it beneath the ocean. So if you measure it from its base inside the ocean to its tip, it is almost a mile longer than Everest. Again the tallest waterfall on earth is Angel Falls in Venezuela which drops from a height of 3200 ft. but somewhere between Greenland and Iceland, there occurs a difference in temperature. Due to this, when cold water from east hits warm water from west, it goes underneath to create a water fall with a drop of 11500 ft., nearly 3.5 times taller than angel falls.
So the next time when someone asks you “which is the tallest mountain or waterfall?” am sure you will have some interesting facts to tell. Let us now invite our General Evaluator to present his report on the meeting.
Once the evaluation section is over, you may conclude the theme with the following.
So as I mentioned, we know very less about oceans and one reason is that they are huge. Approximately 70% of earth is just oceans. If you lay out the entire India a hundred times on the ocean floor, you will still have space for USA and USSR, countries that are 12 times the size of India and even squeeze in Pakistan.
While we have mapped 100% of this ocean bed, the current mapping is with sonar from satellites. Due to this, only features that are more than 5 km in size have been recorded. Therefore, when the doomed plane MH 370 was being searched, each plane parts being a few meters in size were not detectable. For this, special vehicles had to be taken closer to the sea bed to find those parts. So now I want you to imagine more than 100 India laid side by side and then one vehicle with sonar on board going over every inch to find if there is any aircraft part in slow motion, this is how tough it was to find the aircraft and that is why only so less of the ocean floor could be recorded with high resolution.
It’s time now for the awards.
In our next post, I will cover a third facet of this broad theme that I explored the third time I was the TMOD.
My Meeting Roles 