Expanding the view of the father of biogeochemistry, Vladimir Vernadsky (The Biosphere), the McMenamins advance a systems view of the colonization of the land through deep time that they term the Hypersea Hypothesis. Like the New Symbiotic Biology and Gaia Theory, Hypersea is a unified worldview that recognizes the terrestrial sea of “animated water” that is both the sum of terrestrial life and the nested environments in which bionts at various scales survive on land.