The Restless Sea: Exploring the World Beneath the Waves - Hardcover

Kunzig, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393045625 ISBN 13: 9780393045628

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

“Meticulously researched and elegantly written, this book answers questions about the ocean I didn’t even know I had. For the first time, I feel I truly understand the other two-thirds of our planet. Anyone who loves the sea should read this book.” ―Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm

A vivid, up-to-date tour of the Earth's last frontier, a remote and mysterious realm that nonetheless lies close to the heart of even the most land-locked reader. The sea covers seven-tenths of the Earth, but we have mapped only a small percentage of it. The sea contains millions of species of animals and plants, but we have identified only a few thousand of them. The sea controls our planet's climate, but we do not really understand how. The sea is still the frontier, and yet it seems so familiar that we sometimes forget how little we know about it. Just as we are poised on the verge of exploiting the sea on an unprecedented scale-mining it, fertilizing it, fishing it out-this book reminds us of how much we have yet to learn. More than that, it chronicles the knowledge explosion that has transformed our view of the sea in just the past few decades, and made it a far more interesting and accessible place. From the Big Bang to that far-off future time, two billion years from now, when our planet will be a waterless rock; from the lush crowds of life at seafloor hot springs to the invisible, jewel-like plants that float at the sea surface; from the restless shifting of the tectonic plates to the majestic sweep of the ocean currents, Kunzig's clear and lyrical prose transports us to the ends of the Earth.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Kunzig is European editor of Discover magazine, based in Dijon, France. His writing about the ocean has won the AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award and the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism.

Reviews

With grace and humor and a net cast widely for facts, he presents a compendium of what is known about the ocean and how the men and women we now call oceanographers have assembled that knowledge over the centuries.

In this spirited and engaging book, science writer Kunzig, an editor at Discover magazine, voyages among oceanographers, alive and departed, from dockside to textbook, and reports back on our current understanding, and often dubious treatment, of the world's oceans. Seventy percent of our world is hidden by the oceans' surface. The often great depths precluded serious study until recently, when sonar and probes and submersibles started to take its measure. Far from the barren wastes it was thought to comprise, Kunzig makes clear, the ocean is an unfathomably rich place, even in the cold, lightless crushing deep, where the diversity of species rivals that of a tropical rainforest. Kunzig starts by bringing readers up to speed on oceanographic thinking. For instance: no, the oceans were not formed by volcanoes, but rather by a torrent of planetoids that pelted Earth and kicked up blankets of steam. He goes on to profile scientists and their seminal work, from Henry Cavendish, the egghead archetype who discovered the composition of water, to the toilers in the oceanic trenches at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He describes the wild denizens of the deep sea (porcelain-white crabs, the utterly bizarre sea cucumber), abyssal storms, the sea floor's endless quadrille. He delivers a Cook's tour of seawater in global circulation, forgives the lax morals of water molecules as they change partners billions of times a second. And Kunzig strikes a number of cautionary notes. Poised as humans are to exploit the ocean to its max, it would be wise to remember our boundless ignorance as to its workings. We have nearly fished cod to extinction, a fish once so plentiful that Vikings could practically use them as cobblestones from the Faroes to Newfoundland. A nimble, thorough introduction to the ocean in all its vast, untamable, and fearsome attraction. Kunzig's flair should stir readers' awe and allow them to share in his protective urge. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

How and when were the oceans created? How do they control our climate? What does the ocean floor look like? Kunzig, European editor of Discover magazine, addresses these and other questions in this engaging book, which clearly conveys scientific advances dispelling the myth that the deep sea floor is a "changeless, monotonous, should-be-desert." In truth, Kunzig states, it rivals the rain forests in species diversity. Kunzig describes the unique creatures of the deep?from transparent comb jellies more flexible than a boa constrictor to fist-sized mollusks that cast webs "as big as a dining room table" to capture prey?and the extraordinarily lush Galapagos hot springs, whose "sheer mass of life" has stunned geologists. He explains a controversial proposal to reverse global warming with the help of phytoplankton (single living cells that remove carbon dioxide from the air through photosynthesis), raising the thorny issue of whether scientists should interfere with ocean processes they only dimly understand. Although Kunzig is clearly concerned with environmental damage to the oceans?one chapter demonstrates the catastrophic affects of overfishing on New England cod populations?his primary goal is to provide lay readers with a better understanding of the seas. Deft use of quotations, humor and clever analogies enlivens the sometimes highly technical subject matter and makes the book a worthy glimpse into the world "beneath the waves." Line drawings and maps not seen by PW.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Kunzig, the European editor of Discover magazine, chronicles the history of oceans from the Big Bang to the present. Although some of the material Kunzig sets down as fact is still hotly debated, his writing is clear and easy to understand. His descriptions of the ocean are visual, almost poetic: "Through the action of gravity on water, the sea surface becomes like an attenuated visual echo of the seafloor, piling up over mountains, dipping down over trenches." By describing what we know about the ocean, he reveals what we have yet to discover. If your collection contains Donald G. Groves's The Oceans: A Book of Questions and Answers (LJ 4/15/89); James Hamilton-Paterson's The Great Deep: The Sea and Its Thresholds (LJ 6/15/92); Wesley Marx's The Frail Ocean: A Blueprint for Change in the 1990s and Beyond (LJ 9/15/91); or William H. MacLeish's The Gulf Stream (LJ 2/1/89), this book will not add much. For collections lacking a book on the ocean for the general reader, this one is recommended.?Mary J. Nickum, Bozeman, MT
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393045625
• ISBN 13: 9780393045628
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 354