In Oceans Deep
Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In this masterful account in the spirit of Bill Bryson and Ian Frazier, a longtime deep-sea diver masterfully weaves together the science and history of Earth's last remaining frontier: the sea.
In an age of unprecedented exploration and innovation, our oceans remain largely unknown, and endlessly fascinating: full of mystery, danger, beauty, and inspiration. In Oceans Deep celebrates the daring pioneers who tested the limits of what the human body can endure under water: free divers able to reach 300 feet on a single breath; engineers and scientists who uncovered the secrets of decompression; teenagers who built their own diving gear from discarded boilers and garden hoses in the 1930s; saturation divers who lived under water for weeks at a time in the 1960s; and the trailblazing men who voluntarily breathed experimental gases at pressures sufficient to trigger insanity.
Tracing both the little-known history and exciting future of how we travel and study the depths, Streever's captivating journey includes seventeenth-century leather-hulled submarines, their nuclear-powered descendants, a workshop where luxury submersibles are built for billionaire clients, and robots capable of roving unsupervised between continents, revolutionizing access to the ocean.
In this far-flung trip to the wild, night-dark place of shipwrecks, trapped submariners, oil wells, innovative technologies, and people willing to risk their lives while challenging the deep, we discover all the adventures our seas have to offer -- and why they are in such dire need of conservation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Diver and biologist Streever (Cold: Adventures in the World's Frozen Places) fascinatingly recounts humanity's expeditions beneath the sea in this informative and personal chronicle. With a real knack for storytelling, Streever evocatively puts the reader in the helmets, flippers, and submersibles of sea explorers throughout history. He grippingly recounts the daring, seven-mile journey of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard aboard their "ungainly submersible" Trieste to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep, in 1960; only filmmaker James Cameron has returned to that point, meaning nine more people have gone to the moon than have visited the darkest depths of the ocean. Streever then examines the free diving of 19th-century Greek sponge collectors; the air pressure experiments of 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle; the advent of diving helmets, decompression chambers, and scuba gear; and the evolution of submarines, from the Revolutionary War era Turtle, to the diesel-powered submarines of both World Wars, to today's nuclear-powered behemoths. Streever also shares accounts of his time as an oil field diver and his current dabbling with free diving and operating undersea robots. Writing at the behest of his late father, "my first diving partner," and concluding with a look at how diving contributes to ocean conservation, Streever crafts a book to be enjoyed by divers and general readers alike.
