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 Deepcelebrates 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.
ISBN-13: 9780316551342
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Little - Brown and Company
Publication Date: 06-09-2020
Pages: 320
Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Bill Streever is the bestselling and award-winning author of And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind, Cold, and Heat. As a biologist, he has worked on issues ranging from climate change to the restoration of Arctic tundra to underwater noise to the evolution of cave crayfish. With his wife and co-captain, he splits his time between Alaska and their cruising sailboat, currently in Central America.
Table of Contents
Disclaimer xiii
Preface 3
Chapter 1 Descent 7
Chapter 2 On a Breath 38
Chapter 3 Under Pressure 72
Chapter 4 Saturated 110
Chapter 5 Submerged 151
Chapter 6 The Robots 191
Chapter 7 An Ocean in Need 229
Epilogue 261
Acknowledgments 265
Notes 267
Index 289
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