Tag Archive for: oceans

,

The Dark Frontier: Unlocking the Secrets of the Deep Sea | Jeffrey Marlow

 

The deep sea is one of our planet’s last frontiers. Here, where the light cannot reach, lies a strange, wonderful and breathtaking world, teeming with scientific marvels and lessons for the future of life on this planet. In The Dark Frontier, marine microbiologist and explorer Jeffrey Marlow plunges us into the ocean’s depths and invites us to witness close-up encounters with its hidden brilliance. Translucent shrimp dance through sulphurous vents, crabs stretch twelve feet from claw to claw and the eerie chalk-white towers of the ‘Lost City’ loom.

Immersive and illuminating, Marlow’s journeys reveal alarming warning signs as well: we are irrevocably changing the deep sea before we have even had a chance to understand it. This book offers insights into the ways in which the twinned forces of exploration and exploitation have shaped our relationship with the ocean. It shows how life can thrive in even the most extreme conditions, and reveals critical links between the deep sea and life on land.

, ,

What the Wild Sea Can Be | Helen Scales

 

Shortlisted for the 2025 Womens Prize for non-fiction, marine biologist Helen Scales’ exploration of the changing nature of our oceans, drawing on 20 years of research, attempts to answer the question of whether it’s possible to be hopeful about the future of the blue planet. “I set out to tread a path that combines pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,” she writes. “I don’t want to shy away from the troubles, and at the same time I want readers to hope for, and demand, a better future.” The result is a lucid, beautifully-written and highly informed call to save the oceans upon which human life depends.

,

Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World | Helen Czerski

 

“In Blue Machine, we are immersed into the world of the ocean with spectacular detail, from the minuscule to the macroscopic, guided through the ocean’s anatomy and introduced to the people who live in intimate relationships with it. It is overwhelming and astounding how little we know about our oceans despite the immense role they play in sustaining life on this planet. With ocean temperatures reaching 400-year highs, and mounting threats from deep-sea mining operations across the globe, understanding and taking action to protect ocean ecosystems has never been more urgent. Through compelling narratives, inspiring stories and in-depth research Helen Czerski transforms our view of the Blue Machine.” Joycelyn Longdon, Wainwright Conservation Prize judge and founder of Climate in Colour.

,

Rewilding the Sea: How to Save our Oceans | Charles Clover

 

This hopeful book celebrates what happens when we step aside and let nature repair the damage. Whether it is the overfishing of bluefin tuna across the Atlantic, the destruction of coral gardens by dredgers in Lyme Bay or the restoration of oysters on the East Coast of America, Charles Clover chronicles how determined individuals are proving that the crisis in our oceans can be reversed, with benefits for both local communities and entire ecosystems.

Trawling and dredging create more CO2 than the aviation industry, damaging vast areas of our continental shelves and preventing them them from soaking up carbon. Glover explains how we need to fish in different ways, if we fish at all. Rewilding the Sea gives us a positive vision of how we can mitigate climate change and restore the biodiversity in our oceans.

,

A Seabird’s Cry | Adam Nicolson

 

In this engaging book, the reader takes flight through the lives of ten species of seabird. Nicloson translates data and findings from the latest scientific research into compelling stories, combining them with intimate portraits gleaned from the thousands of hours he has spent absorbed in the lives of these astonishing seabirds. They are master navigators, thriving in the most spectacular and demanding environments on the planet. Nicolson’s prose let’s you feel the lift of the wind as the birds smell and forage their way across the breadth of the oceans.

The Seabird’s Cry is a celebration of the only creatures at home in the air, on land and on the sea. These birds see it all and the book carries a warning: extinction stalks the ocean and there is a danger that the grand cry of a seabird colony will this century become a memory.

,

Deep Water: The World in the Ocean | James Bradley

 

A vast journey spanning the breadth, depths, past, present and future of the oceans from their evolution and science, to their exploration and exploitation. Woven through with mystery, wisdom and wonder, Deep Water explores humankind’s complex relationship with the oceans along with an uncompromising view of the environmental catastrophe unfolding, but it is also suffused with the glories of the ocean and alert to the extraordinary efforts of the scientists and researchers whose work helps us understand its secrets. Immense in scope but also profoundly personal, it offers vital new ways of understanding humanity’s place on our planet, and shows how the oceans might yet save us all. Compassionate and urgent, Bradley’s vivid writing brings the oceans alive and reminds us of what we are at risk of losing.

,

The Sea Around Us | Rachel Carson

 

Author of the iconic Silent Spring, marine biologist Rachel Carson is at her lyrical best as she tells us the history of the oceans, from their creation to what she imagined their future might hold. Published over seventy years ago, The Sea Around Us remains one of the most influential books about the natural world and though written well before the theory of plate tectonics changed our understanding of the physical backdrop to the oceans, it is still a prophetic account, alerting readers to a future climate crisis and warning of the fragility and centrality of oceans and the life within them.

The Sea Around Us, is the second book in Carson’s sea trilogy, establishing her as a well-loved author who combines poetic prose with a scalpel-sharp scientific mind.

,

The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed | Helen Scales

Brilliant Abyss Book Cover

 

The deep sea is the last, vast wilderness on the planet. For centuries, myth-makers and storytellers have concocted imaginary monsters of the deep, now scientists are looking there to find bizarre, unknown species, chemicals to make new medicines, and to gain a greater understanding of how this world works.

The Brilliant Abyss tells the story of our relationship with the deep sea – how we imagine, explore and exploit it. It captures the golden age of discovery we are currently in and looks back at the history of how we got here, while also looking forward to the unfolding new environmental disasters that are taking place miles beneath the waves, far beyond the public gaze.

Readers are taken on a chronological journey through humanity’s developing relationship with the deep sea. The Brilliant Abyss ends by looking forwards to humanity’s advancing impacts on the deep, including mining and pollution and what we can do about them.

 

Cephalopography 2.0 | Rasiqra Revulva

Cephalopography 2.0 is as much a passionate celebration of cephalopods in all their plurality and finery as it is a collection of poems exploring human identity and experience through the lens of these marine animals. These experiments with traditional poetic forms such as ghazals, tankas and cinquains, as well as more contemporary forms, make poems that are uniquely and beautifully composed. Cephalopography 2.0 plunges into the depths of human experience to daringly remark on the wild and transformative links between cephalopods and humanity beyond the land and the sea.