Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science
10 best books like Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science (Robert Kunzig): The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language, Song for the Blue Ocean, Listening to Whales: What the Orcas Have Taught Us, Demon Fish: Travels Through the Hidden World of Sharks, The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One, Why Elephants Have Big Ears: And Other Riddles from the Natural World, The Rarest of the Rare: Stories Behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth, Sealab: America's Forgotten Quest to Live and Work on the Ocean Floor
| Author | David Quammen |
| ISBN | 0684836262 |
From the award-winning author of The Song of the Dodo comes a collection of essays in which various weird and wonderful aspects of nature are examined. From tales of vegetarian piranha fish and voiceless dogs to the scientific search for the genes that threaten to destroy the cheetah, Quammen captures...
| Author | John Maynard Smith |
| ISBN | 0198504934 |
When John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary published The Major Transitions in Evolution, it was seen as a major work in biology. Nature hailed it as a book of "grand and daunting sweep.... A splendid and rewarding tour de force." And New Scientist wrote that it captured "the essence of modern biology,"...
| Author | Carl Safina |
| ISBN | 0805061223 |
This incredible book is a searing look at humanity's attitude towards the formerly inexhaustible sea, and I will never be the same after reading it. Parts made me cry hard enough I got a headache. More than once I thought suicide might be a reasonable alternative to using up more of our resources.
I...
| Author | Alexandra Morton |
| ISBN | 0345442881 |
In Listening to Whales, Alexandra Morton shares spellbinding stories about her career in whale and dolphin research and what she has learned from and about these magnificent mammals. In the late 1970s, while working at Marineland in California, Alexandra pioneered the recording of orca sounds by...
| Author | Juliet Eilperin |
| ISBN | 0375425128 |
A group of traders huddles around a pile of dried shark fins on a gleaming white floor in Hong Kong. A Papua New Guinean elder shoves off in his hand-carved canoe, ready to summon a shark with ancient magic. A scientist finds a rare shark in Indonesia and forges a deal with villagers so it and other species...
| Author | Sylvia A. Earle |
| ISBN | 1426205414 |
A Silent Spring for our era, this eloquent, urgent, fascinating book reveals how just 50 years of swift and dangerous oceanic change threatens the very existence of life on Earth. Legendary marine scientist Sylvia Earle portrays a planet teetering on the brink of irreversible environmental crisis.
In...
| Author | Chris Lavers |
| ISBN | 0312303335 |
Why Elephants Have Big Ears is the result of one man's lifelong quest to understand why the creatures of the earth appear and act as they do. In a wry manner and personal tone, Chris Lavers explores and solves some of nature's most challenging evolutionary mysteries, such as why birds are small and plentiful,...
Where do you find Nabokov's butterflies, George Washington's pheasants, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition? The vast collections of animals, minerals, and plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History are among the oldest in the country, dating back to the 1700s....
| Author | Richard Conniff |
| ISBN | 0393068544 |
The story of bold adventurers who risked death to discover strange life forms in the farthest corners of planet Earth.
Beginning with Linnaeus, a colorful band of explorers made it their mission to travel to the most perilous corners of the planet and bring back astonishing new life forms....
| Author | Ben Hellwarth |
| ISBN | 0743247450 |
Sealab is the underwater Right Stuff: the compelling story of how a US Navy program sought to develop the marine equivalent of the space station—and forever changed man’s relationship to the sea.
While NASA was trying to put a man on the moon, the US Navy launched a series of daring experiments...
| Author | Julia Whitty |
| ISBN | 0618119817 |
At the center of Deep Blue Home, a penetrating exploration of the ocean as single vast current and of the creatures dependent on it, is Whitty's description of the three-dimensional ocean river, far more powerful than the Nile or the Amazon, encircling the globe. It's a watery force connected to the...
| Author | Elizabeth Royte |
| ISBN | 0618257586 |
This mischievous behind-the-scenes account of life at a biological research station on a Panamanian island "conveys the uncertainties, frustrations, and joys of [scientific] field work" (Science). Journalist Elizabeth Royte weaves together her own adventures on Barro Colorado with tales of...
Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger
| Author | Margaret Mittelbach |
| ISBN | 0812967690 |
Packing an off-kilter sense of humor and keen scientific minds, Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson, along with renowned artist Alexis Rockman, take off on a postmodern safari. Their mission? Tracking down the elusive Tasmanian tiger. Tragically, this mysterious, striped predator was hunted...
| Author | Claire Nouvian |
| ISBN | 0226595668 |
On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface, or at most to altitudes of a hundred meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions: with an average depth of 3800 meters, the oceans offer 99% of the space on Earth where...
| Author | Stephen R. Palumbi |
| ISBN | 1400849934 |
The ocean teems with life that thrives under difficult situations in unusual environments. The Extreme Life of the Sea takes readers to the absolute limits of the ocean world--the fastest and deepest, the hottest and oldest creatures of the oceans. It dives into the icy Arctic and boiling hydrothermal...
| Author | Ted Danson |
| ISBN | 1605292621 |
Most people know Ted Danson as the affable bartender Sam Malone in the long-running
television series Cheers. But fewer realize that over the course of the past two and a half
decades, Danson has tirelessly devoted himself to the cause of heading off a looming global
catastrophe—the...
| Author | Callum Roberts |
| ISBN | 1597261025 |
Humanity can make short work of the oceans’ creatures. In 1741, hungry explorers discovered herds of Steller’s sea cow in the Bering Strait, and in less than thirty years, the amiable beast had been harpooned into extinction. It’s a classic story, but a key fact is often omitted. Bering Island...
Seven Tenths: The Sea and Its Thresholds
| Author | James Hamilton-Paterson |
| ISBN | 0571229387 |
"Travelling long distances by sea, on the other hand, gives us time. Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. We join in with shipboard life just as soon as we wish, and not before. Otherwise we write in our cabin or...
Until a few decades ago, the ocean depths were almost as mysterious and inaccessible as outer space. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface with an average depth of more than two miles--yet humans had never ventured more than a few hundred feet below the waves. One of the great scientific and...
| Author | Tim Ecott |
| ISBN | 0802139078 |
In Neutral Buoyancy, journalist and diver Tim Ecott takes you on a guided tour of the history of undersea exploration and the emergence of diving culture. He tells the extraordinary story of man's attempts to breathe underwater, from the sponge divers described by Aristotle, to the development of...
| Author | Gavin Pretor-Pinney |
| ISBN | 0399534261 |
35. The Wave Watcher's Companion: Ocean Waves, Stadium Waves, and All the Rest of Life's Undulations by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
published: 2010
format: 320 page Paperback
acquired: from amazon in 2012
read: Aug 16-30
rating: 3½
Pretor-Pinney is author of The Cloudspotter's...
| Author | Simon Conway Morris |
| ISBN | 0192862022 |
In The Crucible of Creation, paleontologist Simon Conway Morris describes the marvelous finds of the Burgess Shale--a fantastically rich deposit of bizarre and bewildering Cambrian fossils, located in Western Canada.
Conway Morris is one of the few paleontologists ever to explore the Burgess...
