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D. A. V. Stow
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VANISHED OCEAN: How Tethys Reshaped the World Paperback – 29 Mar. 2012

by Dorrik Stow (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 86 ratings
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This is a book about an ocean that vanished six million years ago - the ocean of Tethys. Named after a Greek sea nymph, there is a sense of mystery about such a vast, ancient ocean, of which all that remains now are a few little pools, like the Caspian Sea. There were other great oceans in the history of the Earth - Iapetus, Panthalassa - but Tethys was the last of them, vanishing a mere moment (in geological terms) before Man came on the scene. Once Tethys stretched across the world. How do we know? And how could such a vast ocean vanish? The clues of its existence are scattered from Morocco to China. This book tells the story of the ocean, from its origins some 250 million years ago, to its disappearance. It also tells of its impact on life on Earth. The dinosaurs were just beginning to get going when Tethys formed, and they were long dead by the time it disappeared. Dorrik Stow describes the powerful forces that shaped the ocean; the marine life it once held and the rich deposits of oil that life left behind; the impact of its currents on environment and climate.

It is rarely realized how very important oceans are to climate and environment, and therefore to life on Earth. The story of Tethys is also a story of extinctions, and floods, and extraordinary episodes such as the virtual drying up of the Mediterranean, before being filled again by a dramatic cascade of water over the straits of Gibralter. And in the telling of that story, we also learn how geologists put together the clues in rocks and fossils to discover Tethys and its history.
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  1. ISBN-10
    9780199214297
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0199214297
  3. Edition
    Reprint
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    29 Mar. 2012
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    19.3 x 12.7 x 2.54 cm
  8. Print length
    300 pages
  9. See all details
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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
86 global ratings

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Customers find the book well-informed, perfect, and interesting from start to finish. They also appreciate the right amount of personal details.

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15 customers mention ‘Readability’15 positive0 negative

Customers find the book well-informed, interesting, and easy to read. They appreciate the good maps and graphs. Readers also say it provides the right amount of personal details.

"Interesting book...." Read more

"Absolutely wonderful book - kept me spellbound until the last page, when I started again at the beginning to catch all the information I was bound..." Read more

"...Fascinating, very easy to read and understand for a non scientist...." Read more

"...That minor point aside the book is an excellent read from an author with great depth of knowledge and experience meaning that the complex mechanisms..." Read more

4 customers mention ‘Content’4 positive0 negative

Customers find the content interesting and well-told.

"Absolutely wonderful book - kept me spellbound until the last page, when I started again at the beginning to catch all the information I was bound..." Read more

"...Well this book tells you everything you wanted to know. Fascinating, very easy to read and understand for a non scientist...." Read more

"...way of 'seeing the wood for the trees' as the book covers, in an engaging way, the full history of the Tethys Ocean without getting too tied down in..." Read more

"A fascinating tale of how the world comes to be the way it is, it kept me interested from start to finish." Read more

Top reviews from United Kingdom

D. Thomas
5.0 out of 5 stars Dorrick Stow's "Vanished Ocean"
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 November 2012
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This is a fascinating story of breaking, moving and merging continents, and the consequences of these processes for the great but now-vanished Tethys Ocean. Dorrick Stow does an excellent job, not only telling the story but giving his readers enough background (plate tectonics & sedimentology, for examples) to ensure we can follow his narrative. He brings home how radically our world has changed since the Cambrian explosion, especially during and after the Mesozoic when Tethys had its day. Another strong thread is his account of the ecology of Tethys and how this can be interpreted from the sediments and fossils of the period. Inevitably this involves accounts of evolutionary diversification and extinction as global circumstances changed, and includes a salutary counter-argument to the view that the great KT extinction event was caused solely by a bolide-impact. (Interestingly, the authors of the chapter on dinosaur-extinction in "The Dinosauria" [Eds. Weishampel et al. 2004] agree to differ as to whether dinosaurs were already in decline before the end of the Cretaceous). One legacy of Tethys with modern economic implications is the series of great oilfields, and DS gives an illuminating picture of the Tethyan circumstances leading to their origin and geographical distribution. I liked DS's occasional personal anecdotes of his research trips and of key sites, which give some flavour of the foot-work needed to gather the evidence on which this whole story depends. Overall I enjoyed reading this book, and (more to the point) I learnt a lot and was enthused enough to read further. Thank you, Dorrick Stow.
6 people found this helpful
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persona
4.0 out of 5 stars A different perspective
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 14 January 2020
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Interesting book. Been trying to get deeper into history of the earth and this seemed ideal, especially as from the different perspective of oceanography. It seems plate tectonics has played a critical role in evolution and the author makes a good case as to why the KT dinosaur extinction asteroid may not be as important as we're led to believe.
He chats about the scenery of his explorations and enjoying a glass of wine a little too much, but hell, we're all human trying to give a sense of ourselves in the world.. that's what evolution has equipped us to do.

Geologists think differently. You read this book, get your head round the era of Tethys - from 250 million years ago to 5 MYA, see the diagrams of how the continents have moved - grasp all that.. and then near the end of the book he mentions some rocks that are 500 million years old.. and says they are "young" ;-)
3 people found this helpful
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Martin Sladdin
5.0 out of 5 stars Can’t fault it.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 30 August 2018
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Before reading this I knew nothing about Tethys apart from it existed and was somewhere near where today’s Mediterranean sits today. I now know it was much more than this and featured from when the single vast continent, Pangea, dominated the globe until plate movements squeezed it away. Understanding the Earth’s history involves every scientific discipline you care to mention. Here the book describes how ancient ocean currents, temperature, carbon dioxide and oxygen levels interact together with the life in the seas, land and in particular the continental shelves.

He describes how mass extinctions and the successive radiation of new life to repopulate the seas and continents and how the story is told in rocks forming the bed of Tethys. Without spoiling the plot, he mentions the KT event that wiped out the dinosaurs and warns of a possible human related impact due to climate change. A touch if irony here because much research has been funded by the oil industry.

The only let down is on Kindle paper white the maps and diagrams are unreadable not the book’s fault, but a limitation of the e reader.
3 people found this helpful
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Ms. Sheila A. Hyem Hunter
5.0 out of 5 stars An incredibly good read - it kept me spellbound throughout Christmas
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 28 December 2015
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Absolutely wonderful book - kept me spellbound until the last page, when I started again at the beginning to catch all the information I was bound to have missed in such a concentrated feast on the first reading. I had heard of the Tethys Ocean, but had certainly not before appreciated the extent of the then world it covered, and the extent of the effect of its closure on such a wide area of Europe, North Africa and Asia. Professor Stow's book has filled in so many of the enormous gaps in my understanding, especially of mountain building episodes - The Alps, the Himalayas, and so many other gaps as well. This book is so delightful in that a complete layman with no knowledge of geology or oceanography could be spellbound by it and the fast-moving pace of the text. Oh for a television series based on this book - or even just one humdinger of a programme.
4 people found this helpful
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Ms. R. L. Norton
5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely wonderful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 27 January 2019
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I knew about Pangaea (courtesy of Iain Steward's TV programme) but little about the ocean. Well this book tells you everything you wanted to know. Fascinating, very easy to read and understand for a non scientist. The Tethys Ocean covered the globe for 250 million years, when there was only 18% of land, saw several extinctions including the dinosaurs and is why we have oil. Then it was squeezed out of existence 5½ million years ago.
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A. J. Martyr
4.0 out of 5 stars an epic tale well told
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 9 June 2010
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I read this book intending it to be light relief from my geological studies and it proved an excellent way of 'seeing the wood for the trees' as the book covers, in an engaging way, the full history of the Tethys Ocean without getting too tied down in the complex detail.
Dorrik Stow is a well known sceptic about the KT boundary being due to a single event, and he makes his case within this book, but seems to carry that sceptism through to trying to prove that the indicators for the Chicxulub bolide were caused by other events which seems to me to be unnecessary as many geologists would believe the event did occur and was additive to the environmental stresses from other causes. That minor point aside the book is an excellent read from an author with great depth of knowledge and experience meaning that the complex mechanisms involved are covered accurately but without resort to the arcane language so beloved of many geological authors.
I suppose the book will be filed in stores under 'popular science' which is an impossibly wide target audience so my 4 stars is based on my own special interest; many general readers would find it worthy of 5 stars.
21 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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jm
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent narrative
Reviewed in the United States on 2 March 2022
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This book describes the science of what happened, how it did and of the animals and plants that lived at the various times of this ocean, making it a fascinating discussion of deep time. It also does it with a minimum of the history of discovery and scientific arguments, which is a relief.
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Cliente
2.0 out of 5 stars Just a divulgation book
Reviewed in Italy on 2 November 2017
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I hoped to find a lot of proves about the existence of the Tethys ocean. Otherwere there is just the story of the pangea until present day. I hoped to find something like "the tethys ocean existed because we found the fossils of this this and that and then we think that thethys existed, but nothing about that, just private life of the author. There is no also literature because, according to the author, was too much. In this way i could not dig the argument.
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romarin
4.0 out of 5 stars 海洋の影響
Reviewed in Japan on 7 April 2020
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本書は、２億５０００万年間続いて、５５０万年前に消滅したテチス海を主題とした一冊である。テチス海は超大陸パンゲアの東側に出現した。その後パンゲアが分裂していくと、テチス海はローレシア大陸とゴンドワナ大陸の間にも入り込み、現在の北米・ユーラシア大陸と、南米・アフリカの間を通るような具合になり、陸地が現在の位置に近付くにつれて、欧州とアフリカの間の狭い海になっていき、現在の地中海辺りで干上がった。かつてテチス海であった所は造山運動などで隆起し、現在、高山の上に海の痕跡が残る。
英国の地質学者・海洋学者である著者は、海底掘削船での調査やフィールドワークの体験を交えながら、海における生態系・食物連鎖の仕組み、堆積のメカニズムや、海洋が地球の気候や生命に及ぼす影響などを綴っていく。テチス海の長年の歴史の中で、主な海流の方向も東西から南北へと変わり、複数回の大量絶滅事象も起きた。その中で、テチス海は様々な生命を育み続け、天然資源を含む多くの痕跡を世界各地に残した。現代の我々からみれば、気候への影響も含めて、寧ろテチス海消滅による影響の方が大きく感じられるかもしれない。
本書では、テチス海に限らず、海における生命や堆積の一般的な説明も少なくない。また、実地調査の体験談も含めて余談・脱線も多く、本筋を追いづらいところもある。英文は難解ではないが、as…asの応用構文が多用されるきらいがある。
巻末には簡便な用語集、Further Reading、索引つき。
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Gregory J. Auger
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful Writing, Up-to-date Geology
Reviewed in the United States on 3 September 2010
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It's rare to find a book that's so accessible to the general well-read reader in the field of marine geology and science. Books available seem to either emphasize the complex details of a researcher's work, or to gloss over science and focus on the strange or grandiose.
Vanished Ocean is sometimes a bit whimsical and personal, which lightens the reading. But it's also an excellent overview of what we know right now about a strange period in our planet's history, when life first nearly vanished in the blink of an eye (90 to 96 percent of Earth's life forms disappeared) then reappeared with a grand flourish in the warm, broad, shallow seas of the Tethys Ocean.
Very cool reading.
7 people found this helpful
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Amazon Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars Much more Vanilla than Expected.
Reviewed in the United States on 9 April 2011
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When I first saw this book advertised on Amazon in my suggestions section, I quickly added it to my shopping list because it seemed like a very interesting topic. Who wouldn't want to know more about supercontinents and a long-vanished ocean that had a big impact on the world? In actuality, this book ends up being more of a geological and biological history of the areas related to the ancient ocean known as Thethys. There are some very interesting an relatively little-known (to lay readers) facts about Pangea and Tethys and some very fresh perspectives on things like mass extinction events and how they relate to previous tectonic arrangements of the planet, but overall, the book reads more like a standard history of the geology of a particular section of the planet. To me that is an interesting enough topic to keep me reading, but I should point out that in places, the author lists so many types of rocks or organisms in such a short space that some readers might become exasperated and give up before getting to the end of the book, which in my opinion, is one of the strongest parts.

Like many books of this type, there are a number of interesting anecdotes derived from the author's extensive trips and research junkets to places as disparate as an ocean drilling expedition and rock collecting trips to Tibet. He gives numerous examples of how evidence of the history of Tethys can be seen in different places around the globe. Included in the book also are a number of maps showing the general layout of the continents and oceans for the corresponding chapter.

The books starts at about 250 million years ago when the Pangea supercontinent had just formed and covers how the ocean that formed on its eastern edge witnessed and was part of various events such as the end Permian mass extinction, the formation of oil deposits, the flourishing of new avenues of evolution leading up to the dinosaurs, the so-called KT boundary event and the progress up to the current layout of the continents and the organisms that inhabit them. For a layperson, I think the great value in a book like this is that it allows you to connect events everyone knows and hears about such as the end Permian extinction, the KT event and the Eocene warm period with tectonic layouts that were quite different than the current one and as such, implied different climate, ocean circulation and biological regimes than we see now.
6 people found this helpful
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