Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science – Robert Kunzig
Robert Kunzig won the Aventis Science Book of the Year award in 2001 for this book (the 2011 winner was The Wavewatcher’s Companion!). It is an absolutely fantastic piece of science writing, charting the state of the art in ocean science as well as the historical processes that led us to where we are today (or were in 2000).
Kunzig mostly used scientific papers and interviews with the scientists themselves as his primary sources, making complex mechanisms understandable without loss of information in the transmission.
The first few chapters of the book deal with the challenges of finding out what the ocean floor looks like, and of representing it in a useful way. Those beautiful maps of the ocean floor that I pored over in the atlas as a child, or in Sylvia Earle and Linda Glover’s wonderful Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas aren’t as precise as you may think they are – we often repeat the aphorism about how little of the ocean we have explored – but conveniently forget that this also precludes us from making detailed maps of it. The United States Navy probably has the most comprehensive sea floor maps, but they aren’t sharing.
Kunzig devotes several chapters to the type of life found in the ocean – he is not so much concerned with coastal as pelagic life forms, and devotes many fascinating pages to hydrothermal vent communities without once mentioning Robert Ballard. I experienced serious job envy reading about the blue water diving that Bill Hamner did to collect and study pelagic marine organisms such as jellies and plankton.
The influence of humans on the ocean’s environment is the subject of the next few chapters. There is a terrible, compulsively readable chapter about the New England cod fishery that was so convincingly destroyed, even with the assistance of government scientists. The final sections of the book deal with climate change and the ocean.
You can read other reviews of the book here and here. Here’s some of Kunzig’s writing, to give you a taste of what this book is like.
If you’re in South Africa, get a copy of the book here, otherwise try here or here. This is an updated edition of The Restless Sea, so don’t buy that one!
