Mapping the Deep
by Robert Kunzig
Summary
The deep ocean is the largest habitat on earth and the least examined, and Kunzig's book is the great tour of what the explorers of it had learned by the century's turn, told through the science's own adventures.
The chapters descend. The mapping itself: how sonar, and then satellites reading the sea surface's subtle bulges, revealed the drowned landscape, mid ocean ridges running like seams round the planet, trenches, ten thousand drowned volcanoes, a geography nobody had seen. The plate tectonic revolution that the seafloor forced on geology. The vents, discovered in 1977, chimneys of black smoke on the ridge crests with ecosystems running on chemistry instead of sunlight, tube worms and heat loving microbes that reset biology's sense of where life can live and maybe where it began. The midwater, the planet's true middle kingdom, where submersible biologists found the gelatinous majority, siphonophores forty metres long, salps, jellies of every architecture, animals no net had ever brought up intact. The fish chapters, cod's collapse off Newfoundland told as the cautionary epic it is, five hundred years of plenty ended in a generation of industrial sonar and denial. And the currents, the global conveyor of heat and salt that makes the deep sea the flywheel of climate.
Kunzig, a Discover magazine editor, writes scientist by scientist, cruise by cruise, with a reporter's eye for the person attached to each discovery.
Around three hundred and forty pages.
Best for readers who want the ocean's whole modern revelation in one book, written when most of it was still news.
Historical Context & Significance
Mapping the Deep won the prize in 2001, the first year of Aventis's sponsorship, and it remains one of the least famous winners on the list, which says more about oceanography's public relations than about the book: reviewers at the time rated it at the top of journalistic treatments of the field, and it has aged into a benchmark, the snapshot of ocean science at the moment before the deluge, Argo floats, ocean observatories, the Census of Marine Life, industrialised the exploration it describes.
The book began life in hardcover as The Restless Sea, and its author, Robert Kunzig, long Discover's European editor, went on to write for National Geographic on the environment and to co write, with the climate scientist Wallace Broecker, Fixing Climate, staying on the beat this book's final current chapters opened.
Its cod chapter meanwhile became a set text of fisheries collapse, the Newfoundland story told before the moratorium's permanence was clear.