Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #817417 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-29
• Released on: 1999-03-29
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.17" h x 6.33" w x 9.28" l, 1.51 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 384 pages

From Amazon.com
The Restless Sea is an homage to marine-obsessed scientists. Discover editor Robert Kunzig lovingly describes pioneering oceanographers mapping the mountains and valleys of the sea floor, discovering strange ecosystems thriving in the abyssal deep, identifying strange new gelatinous zooplankton floating in the vast blue mid-ocean realm, finding out how marine food webs work, and (most depressingly) assessing the damage done by pollution and overfishing. Kunzig loves the sea, and he admires those who study its fringes, its surface, and its depths to figure out what makes it tick.

Part of Kunzig's purpose in writing the book is to highlight how little we actually know about the sea, especially now that we have the power to permanently damage it. We've got a lot to learn yet, but we've come a long way from the early oceanographers who had very little data to help them map the seafloor: "To say that they relied heavily on intuition in sketching the seafloor is to engage in euphemism: they made most of it up."

But the unknown represents opportunity and excitement for scientists. Kunzig clearly captures the thrill of discovery that makes otherwise sane people jump on boats and head out beyond sight of land, risking seasickness, numbing cold, and even death. Here he captures the moment when scientists realized for the first time that life existed down to the very bottom of the sea:

From the 150 pounds of grey, chalky mud, he and his collaborators sifted five species of mollusk, two species of echinoderm, an annelid worm or two, a sponge, numerous single-cell foraminiferans, and more.... Now the deep sea was, once and for all, alive; and the idea of an azoic zone anywhere on Earth's surface should have been dead, once and for all.

Kunzig's tour of the world's oceans and the scientists who study them is full of the joy of discovery. The Restless Sea makes you understand why a couple of echinoderms might be cause for a party. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
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.

From Library Journal
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.