Restless Sea: Exploring the World Beneath the Waves [Hardcover]

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 tofigure 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 beyondsight of land, risking seasickness, numbing cold and even death. Here he captures the moment when scientists realised 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, Amazon.com

The sea covers seven-tenths of the Earth, but only a small percentage of it has been mapped. It contains millions of species of animal and plants but only a few thousand of them have been identified. It controls the climate but it is not understood how. It is the last frontier and yet it seems so familiar that it is sometimes forgotten how little is known about it. This work chronicles the knowledge accumulated over the past few decades which has transformed the view of the sea. It looks at the sea, from the Big Bang to the far-off future when the planet will become a waterless rock; from the lush crowds of life at sea floor hot springs to the invisible, jewel-like plants that floats on the sea surface; and from the restless shifting of the tectonic plates to the sweep of the ocean currents.

Review excerpt
"Robert Kunzig is a creator of what oceanographer Harry Hess once referred to as 'geopoetry.' He covers vast tracts of time and space and makes his subjects electrifying. Even the movement of the tectonic plates, not usually a subject of white-knuckle excitement, comes vibrantly alive in The Restless Sea. The same is true for the Challenger voyage, underwater currents, the lives of jellyfish and the unfortunate decline of fish stocks....Kunzig's wonderful book opens up this previously hidden world...."