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The acclaimed marine biologist and author of The Brilliant Abyss examines the existential threats the world's ocean will face in the coming decades and offers cautious optimism for much of the abundant life within in
No matter where we live, we are all ocean people, Helen Scales emphatically observes in her bracing yet hopeful exploration of the future of the ocean. Beginning with its fascinating deep history, Scales links past to present to show how the prehistoric ocean ecology was already working in ways similar to the ocean of today. In elegant, evocative prose, she takes readers into the realms of animals that epitomize today's increasingly challenging conditions. Ocean life everywhere is on the move as seas warm, and warm waters are an existential threat to emperor penguins, whose mating grounds in Antarctica are collapsing. Shark populations--critical to balanced ecosystems--have shrunk by 71 per cent since the 1970s, largely the result of massive and oft-unregulated industrial fishing. Orcas--the apex predators--have also drastically declined, victims of toxic chemicals and plastics with long half-lives that disrupt the immune system and the ability to breed.
Yet despite these threats, many hopeful signs remain. Increasing numbers of no-fish zones around the world are restoring once-diminishing populations. Amazing seagrass meadows and giant kelp forests rivaling those on land are being regenerated and expanded. They may be our best defense against the storm surges caused by global warming, while efforts to reengineer coral reefs for a warmer world are growing.
Offering innovative ideas for protecting coastlines and cleaning the toxic seas, Scales insists we need more ethical and sustainable fisheries and must prevent the other existential threat of deep-sea mining, which could significantly alter life on earth. Inspiring us all to maintain a sense of awe and wonder at the majesty beneath the waves, she urges us to fight for the better future that still exists for the Anthropocene ocean.
From the bestselling author of Breath, a fascinating, informative, exhilarating voyage from the ocean's surface to its darkest trenches (Wall Street Journal)
New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice - An Amazon Best Science Book of 2014 - Scientific American Recommended Read
Fascinated by the sport of freediving--in which competitors descend great depths on a single breath--James Nestor embeds with a gang of oceangoing extreme athletes and renegade researchers. He finds whales that communicate with other whales hundreds of miles away, sharks that swim in unerringly straight lines through pitch-black waters, and other strange phenomena. Most illuminating of all, he learns that these abilities are reflected in our own remarkable, and often hidden, potential--including echolocation, directional sense, and the profound bodily changes humans undergo when underwater. Along the way, Nestor unlocks his own freediving skills as he communes with the pioneers who are expanding our definition of what is possible in the natural world, and in ourselves.
A journey well worth taking. --David Epstein, New York Times Book Review
Nestor pulls us below the surface into a world far beyond imagining and opens our eyes to these unseen places. --Dallas Morning News
This is popular science writing at its best. --Christian Science Monitor
*New enhanced edition of the best-selling guide to sea creatures: The World Beneath!*
Meet the world's most fascinating sea creatures, see the lives and curiosities of colorful fish and coral reefs. This spectacular volume has more than 300 color photos and extraordinary text from a leading marine biologist and underwater photographer who is the international expert on seahorses.
In this richly informative volume, brimming with new discoveries and more than three hundred colorful images of jaw-dropping fish and coral reefs, you'll swim in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; you'll be dazzled in the Coral Triangle and amazed in Triton Bay. Up close you'll meet the Cenderawasih fairy wrasse, with its fluorescent yellow streak; the polka-dot longnose filefish; and the multicolored seadragon. There are scarlet-colored corals, baby-blue sponges, daffodil crinoids, and all sorts of mystifying creatures that change color at the drop of a hat. The whale shark is almost larger than life and the author's beloved pygmy seahorse, unless photographed, is almost too tiny to see.
The wondrous creatures inside are charmers and tricksters and excel in the arts of seduction and deception, and you'll have the rare chance to see and delight in their antics. You'll also learn what they eat, how they play, and how they care for one another, live on one another, and mimic others when they're afraid. There is also compelling insight into the naming process, which sea creatures are facing extinction, and how we can help them before it's too late.
This new and expanded edition of The World Beneath has new text from award-winning author Dr. Richard Smith that covers recent developments and discoveries affecting the rapidly changing landscape of the world's coral reefs, a wealth of new images from recent dives around the world, and a thorough index.
Winner, 2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
The world's oceans are changing at a drastic pace. Beneath the waves and along the coasts, climate change and environmental degradation have spurred the most radical transformations in human history. In response, the people who know the ocean most intimately are taking action for the sake of our shared future. Community scientists track species in California tidepools. Researchers dive into the waters around Sydney to replant kelp forests. Scientists and First Nations communities collaborate to restore clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest. In At Every Depth, the oceanographer Tessa Hill and the science journalist Eric Simons profile these and other efforts to understand and protect marine environments, taking readers to habitats from shallow tidepools to the deep sea. They delve into the many human connections to the ocean--how people live with and make their living from the waters--journeying to places as far-flung as coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the Arctic and Antarctic poles. At Every Depth shares the stories of people from all walks of life, including scientists, coastal community members, Indigenous people, shellfish farmers, and fisheries workers. It brings together varied viewpoints, showing how scientists' research and local and Indigenous knowledge can complement each other to inform a more sustainable future. Poignantly written and grounded in science, this book offers a narrative perspective on the changing oceans, letting us see how our relationships to the oceans are changing too.
Easily Identify the Living Things You Find in the Intertidal Zone of the Pacific Coast
Enjoy learning to identify organisms of the rocky reefs and tide pools of the Pacific coast--from Alaska to Baja, California--with this guide from authors Ron Russo and Pam Olhausen. With this handy, easy-to-use book, you'll be able to identify a wide variety of intertidal life in no time. And its small size makes it just right for fitting into your pocket or pack when you go for a walk along the coast.
Features:
A marine biologist vividly brings alive the extraordinary ecosystem of the deep ocean--a realm about which we know less than we do about the Moon--and shows how protecting rather than exploiting it will benefit mankind.
The oceans have always shaped human lives, writes marine biologist Helen Scales in her vibrant new book The Brilliant Abyss, but the surface and the very edges have so far mattered the most. However, one way or another, the future ocean is the deep ocean.
A golden era of deep-sea discovery is underway. Revolutionary studies in the deep are rewriting the very notion of life on Earth and the rules of what is possible. In the process, the abyss is being revealed as perhaps the most amazing part of our planet, with a topography even more varied and extreme than its Earthbound counterpart. Teeming with unsuspected life, an extraordinary interconnected ecosystem deep below the waves has a huge effect on our daily lives, influencing climate and weather systems, with the potential for much more--good or bad depending on how it is exploited. Currently the fantastic creatures that live in the deep--many of them incandescent in a world without light--and its formations capture and trap vast quantities of carbon that would otherwise poison our atmosphere; and novel bacteria as yet undiscovered hold the promise of potent new medicines. Yet the deep also holds huge mineral riches lusted after by many nations and corporations; mining them could ultimately devastate the planet, compounded by the deepening impacts of ubiquitous pollutants and rampant overfishing.
Eloquently and passionately, Helen Scales brings to life the majesty and mystery of an alien realm that nonetheless sustains us, while urgently making clear the price we could pay if it is further disrupted. The Brilliant Abyss is at once a revelation and a clarion call to preserve this vast unseen world.
A SCIENCE NEWS MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF 2023
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2023
Should be required reading. . . . A gripping and all-too-timely account of what in more ways than one is turning out to be a very costly and questionably necessary race to the bottom. . . . Trethewey rises to the occasion here, relating in absorbing detail the ebb and flow of conflicting interests that tussle down among the vents and ridges of the hadal zone. It is all highly readable, and it is all deeply ominous. --Simon Winchester, New York Times Book Review
The dramatic and action-packed story of the last mysterious place on earth--the world's seafloor--and the deep-sea divers, ocean mappers, marine biologists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers involved in the historic push to chart it, as well as the opportunities, challenges, and perils this exploration holds now and for the future.
Five oceans--the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern--cover approximately 70 percent of the earth. Yet we know little about what lies beneath them. By the early 2020s, less than twenty-five percent of the ocean's floor has been charted, most close to shorelines, and over three quarters of the ocean lies in in what is called the Deep Sea, depths below a thousand meters. Now, the race is on to completely map the ocean's floor by 2030--an epic project involving scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers who are cooperating and competing to get an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.
In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey documents this race to the bottom, following global efforts around the world, from crowdsourcing to advances in technology, recent scientific discoveries to tales of dangerous dives in untested and costly submersibles. The lure of ocean exploration has attracted many, including the likes of James Cameron, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, and Eric Schmidt. The Deepest Map follows a cast of intriguing characters, from early mappers such as Marie Tharp, a woman working in the male-dominated fields of oceanography and geology whose discoveries have added significantly to our knowledge; Victor Vescovo, a man obsessed with reaching the deepest depths of each of the five oceans, and his young, brilliant, and fearless mapper Cassie Bongiovanni; and the diverse entrepreneurs looking to explore and exploit this uncharted territory and its resources.
In The Deepest Map, ocean discovery converges with humanity's origin story; in mapping the ocean floor, scientists are actively tracing our roots back to the most inhospitable places on earth where life began--and flourished. But for every conservationist looking to protect the seafloor, there are others who see its commercial potential. Will a new map exacerbate pollution and the degradation of this natural resource? How will the race remake political power structures in years to come? Trethewey probes these questions as countries and conglomerates wrestle over the riches that may lie at the bottom of the sea.
The future of humanity depends on our ability to protect this vast, precious, and often ignored resource. A true tale of science, nature, technology, and an extreme outdoor adventure The Deepest Map illuminates why we love--and fear--the earth's final frontier and is a crucial addition to the increasingly urgent conversation about climate change.
A beautifully illustrated and completely unique nautical book. This celebration of all things ocean features an unprecedented wealth of 21st-century know-how and storytelling.
Informative, inspirational, and incredibly entertaining, The Ocean is the definitive guide to the world's greatest nature treasure and playground.
Filled with more than 200 enlightening and evocative illustrations, this beautiful ocean book features short-subject deep dives on topics like science, sailing, kayaking, surfing, diving, survival, and much more. In addition to thousands of hours of original reporting, authors Chris Dixon and Jeremy K. Spencer also gathered wisdom from dozens of experts, athletes, scientists, explorers, and more to craft an authoritative and captivating guide to all activities involving the sea. The ultimate gift book for sailors, fishers, surfers, beachcombers, and ocean lovers everywhere.UNIQUE AMONG OCEAN BOOKS: From fishing the beach to righting a sailboat, surviving jellyfish to saving our reefs, planning a dive to surfing the waves, The Ocean is rich with how-to advice and instruction to inspire experienced seafarers and ocean novices alike.
CAPTIVATING BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE: Divided into sections on Boating, Surfing, Science, Survival, Scuba and Snorkeling, and Fishing, this ultimate ocean compendium is beautifully illustrated and features expert consultation and entertaining asides about the sea. A GIFT TO TREASURE: This handsomely packaged volume is the go-to guide for anyone captivated by the wonder, power, and mystery of the ocean.Perfect for:
