Product Description
A vivid, up-to-date tour of the Earth's last frontier, a remote and mysterious realm that nonetheless lies close to the heart of even the most land-locked reader. The sea covers seven-tenths of the Earth, but we have mapped only a small percentage of it. The sea contains millions of species of animals and plants, but we have identified only a few thousand of them. The sea controls our planet's climate, but we do not really understand how. The sea is still the frontier, and yet it seems so familiar that we sometimes forget how little we know about it. Just as we are poised on the verge of exploiting the sea on an unprecedented scale-mining it, fertilizing it, fishing it out-this book reminds us of how much we have yet to learn. More than that, it chronicles the knowledge explosion that has transformed our view of the sea in just the past few decades, and made it a far more interesting and accessible place. From the Big Bang to that far-off future time, two billion years from now, when our planet will be a waterless rock; from the lush crowds of life at seafloor hot springs to the invisible, jewel-like plants that float at the sea surface; from the restless shifting of the tectonic plates to the majestic sweep of the ocean currents, Kunzig's clear and lyrical prose transports us to the ends of the Earth.

Amazon.com Review
The Restless Sea is an homage to marine-obsessed scientists. Discover editor Robert Kunzig lovingly describes pioneering oceanographers mapping the mountains and valleys of the sea floor, discovering strange ecosystems thriving in the abyssal deep, identifying strange new gelatinous zooplankton floating in the vast blue mid-ocean realm, finding out how marine food webs work, and (most depressingly) assessing the damage done by pollution and overfishing. Kunzig loves the sea, and he admires those who study its fringes, its surface, and its depths to figure out what makes it tick.

Part of Kunzig's purpose in writing the book is to highlight how little we actually know about the sea, especially now that we have the power to permanently damage it. We've got a lot to learn yet, but we've come a long way from the early oceanographers who had very little data to help them map the seafloor: "To say that they relied heavily on intuition in sketching the seafloor is to engage in euphemism: they made most of it up."

But the unknown represents opportunity and excitement for scientists. Kunzig clearly captures the thrill of discovery that makes otherwise sane people jump on boats and head out beyond sight of land, risking seasickness, numbing cold, and even death. Here he captures the moment when scientists realized for the first time that life existed down to the very bottom of the sea:

From the 150 pounds of grey, chalky mud, he and his collaborators sifted five species of mollusk, two species of echinoderm, an annelid worm or two, a sponge, numerous single-cell foraminiferans, and more.... Now the deep sea was, once and for all, alive; and the idea of an azoic zone anywhere on Earth's surface should have been dead, once and for all.

Kunzig's tour of the world's oceans and the scientists who study them is full of the joy of discovery. The Restless Sea makes you understand why a couple of echinoderms might be cause for a party. --Therese Littleton

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 11 reviews)

fantastically informative

This novel is extremely well written and organized that it so allows the reader to absorb the tremendous amount of dazzling information being explored, yet not feeling overwhelmed.
October 03, 2002

Get the new one with pictures

Great book, however the new book, Mapping the deep, is the same book with pictures. The pictures are great to help understand what is being described instead of imagining it.
June 09, 2001

Stop global warming with a couple of iron freighters

Did you know that we could end 17% of the excess carbon dioxide that we generate every year to the bottom of the ocean? And do it by fertilizing the plankton with iron spread from a freighter? And that this has actually been tested by marine scientists? If not, read The Restless Sea and learn this plus dozens of other fun facts to know and tell. Kunzig is a kind writer. If a scientist has no personality, he writes about the science. If a scientist happens to be a truly warped human being, we get a paragraph or two about the warpage before Kunzig dives back into the science. If you hate James Gleick's endlessly tedious books (e.g., Chaos), you'll be refreshed by Kunzig's work.
January 04, 2001

A riveting ocean read

This well-written book attempts to show how little we know about the huge volume of our planet that lies beneath the surface layer of the ocean. Much of what we thought we knew has turned out to be wrong, and much of what we HAVE learned was discovered astonishingly recently---within the last generation in many cases. Also, Kunzig never lets you forget that the fascinating information we've gathered about undersea currents, say, or biological diversity at great depths, even ocean floor topology, is still sketchy and provisional. Rather than depressing, this is an exciting prospect, an adventure that is still in the early stages (and likely to remain so for some time, since undersea research gets hardly any funding). The only truly depressing part of the book, for me, is the account in chapter eight of the collapse (through overfishing) of the cod population off the coasts of New England and Newfoundland. In any case, Kunzig has the McPhee talent for highlighting the personalities of the scientists involved, but never loses sight of the underlying scientific issues. Also, I like how he begins, appropriately, with the water molecule and how the Earth got all it's water in the first place, then ends the book with how the planet may evenually lose it's water, billions of years hence. Nice symmetry there.
October 20, 2000

The Restless Sea

Absolutely the only uninteresting thing in this book is the title (which sounds like the title of a filmstrip you might have watched in school in about the sixth grade, back in the 60's.) It's a survey of what's known about the oceans, from their formation (the current thinking is that the water came from comets) and oceanography, what the engine is that keeps continental drift going (gravity), why jellyfish and so many other sea creatures are transparent (because underwater, there's no reason to waste resources on features like pigment) on and on and on, a wealth of information explained and described perfectly lucidly. He has a gift for writing very well, explaining technical information to the non-technical layman (I was a history major) as well as John McPhee ever could. It turns out that we have mapped the surface of Venus more accurately than the ocean floor.

So much of what I thought I knew about the ocean is wrong. Remember those relief maps you see, which show the continental shelf dropping off like the grand canyon into the abyss? Turns out that's not accurate, the continental shelf actually slopes at a very gentle rate, not as steep as the mountain passes the Tour de France racers climb. The maps exaggerate the slopes by a factor of ten, emphasizing the presence of the features over their accuracy.

There is so much information in here that I was feeling, as I approached the end of the book, that I should go back through and read it again, for all the stuff I missed.

The story isn't told in the first person plural, like a textbook, but rather is related through the stories of the scientists who made the discoveries. For instance, much of our current understanding of how continental drift works was done by a scientist heating a pan of paraffin in his kitchen. Because it's focuses on the stories of the scientists, it's a story as much about the development of science as about strict oceanography, how the limits of knowledge shift as our ability to ask questions and interpret the answers changes.

I could go on and on and on, but I won't. This is a wonderful, fascinating book about a very important topic. Read it.
August 30, 2000

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