The puffin seems eminently suitable to be our national bird: a dapper little character who is equally at home on sea or land, given to hedonistic feasting when the seasons allow, but also capable of austere self-denial (they spend their winters out in the North Atlantic).
That includes more than 5 million people from North Africa, the Middle East and the so-called "Black Atlantic", the long slice of West Africa which stretches from Mali to Senegal.
In the Faroes, in "European" waters, thousands of pilot whales die each year, driven from the open Atlantic on to the islands' beaches and butchered.
Beware: no wetsuits allowed … From £12, 2 February, chillswim.com Discover Adventure has a new challenge for 2013: a nine-day coast-to-coast ride from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean across the Pyrenees.
Lucky for me, we weren't, as it may sound, in the Sahara desert, we were on the Atlantic coast, so I simply stripped down to my bikini and ran into the sea.
Also, as this excellent Atlantic piece points out, there's a slightly uneasy "white saviour" theme throughout, best exemplified by a genuinely ghastly scene where the family tell the slaves that they're letting them go, everybody starts hugging and, quick as a flash, one of the freed women starts singing Amazing Grace.
Frigate Bay North has most of the hotels, but it is also the Atlantic side, where the tradewinds and rollers come in off the ocean.
As a recent paper published in the journal Nature showed, the Pacific Ocean in particular appears to be the key component of the climate's natural internal variability, and the main culprit behind the slowed global surface warming over the past 15 years.
New smart cities that have begun to take advantage of these tools include Tanzania's Kigamboni, an administrative ward of the capital, Dar es Salaam, Congo's Cité du Fleuve, Kenya's Tatu and Kozo Tech, Ghana's Hope City and Nigeria's Eko Atlantic developments.
