Book Readings: Week 2
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For my Marine Resources class (GEOG 646) at SF State this semester I am reading The Sea Around Us, by Rachel Carson (1951), and The Tide: The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams (2016). Please check out my first Book Reading blog post to read about why I chose these two books and why I chose to blog about them concurrently.
Since I spent the bulk of my previous blog post discussing Carson's book, the bulk of this blog post is dedicated to The Tides by Aldersey-Williams. Before writing this blog post I received a message from the author himself on Twitter, which was a nice and unexpected surprise!
Aldersey-Williams actually mentions The Sea Around Us in his book, which makes for a nice connection between the two works. It's one that I didn't realize existed until I started reading them. Indeed, getting a reply from Aldersey-Williams made me wish Rachel Carson was alive now. It would be great to interact with her on social media, and to have her voice prominent in the national discussion around climate change and the environment.
For this week I read Aldersey-Williams' personal observations on a 12-hour tidal cycle. He goes to a local creek in Norfolk, England that empties into the North Sea and observes what happens for a full day. The way he chose what location, day, and tidal cycle to observe reminded me a lot of how people in my lab plan our field work: Since we're a lab focused on wetland restoration, the overwhelming majority of our field work is at the mercy of the tidal cycles.
The author goes into minute, painstaking detail on his observations, which at first seemed excessive. However, I later realized how well this level of detail highlighted the importance of quiet contemplation and active observation in the process of scientific learning. I also liked that Aldersey-Williams pointed out that observing the tides is a multidisciplinary exercise, from the physics of water flow, to biological observations of fauna and flora in the salt marsh and mud flats that were exposed as the tide went out, and even to physical education as he canoed to get a closer look at anything that attracted his attention.
Aldersey-Williams' thoughts on the tides themselves are quite interesting: I liked his descriptions of how water in the same place flowed at different rates, how low tide didn't occur exactly at the midpoint between the two high tides that bracketed his day of observation, and how the landscape and assemblages of flora and fauna shifted as the tides receded and then returned. I also liked his discussion of plant and algal zonation in the salt marsh and in the intertidal region. His admitted lack of knowledge on certain aspects of the tides was a bit surprising to me as a marine biology major, but I actually liked that he admits that, because even as a marine biology major I don't understand everything about the tides either. That's why I'm reading the book!
Also, as someone who works in a wetlands lab, it was fun to read Aldersey-Williams' descriptions of the salt marsh and the mud flats. He even mentions Suaeda (sea blite) and Limonium (sea lavender) and we work with Suaeda and Limonium species in our lab. I hope to be able to track down a copy of Estuary, a short film time-lapse film of the tides by Susi Arnott, which the author mentions.
Aldersey-Williams then takes the reader to the Mediterranean; there are no personal observations here, just the author's take on the role of tides in history. Interestingly, tides are almost non-existent in the Mediterranean, and Aldersey-Williams points out that had that not been the case, surely the ancient Greeks, who had made many advances in mathematics and science, would have come up with an explanation of how tides work. However, they did not, and it wasn't until the Romans sailed to the British Isles in the hopes of expanding their empire and had their ships wrecked by the tides that they began adapting their boats to withstand the tides.
In the few places where tidal phenomena existed in the Mediterranean, myths and legends were used to explain them. The myth of Scylla and Charybdis is purportedly a reference to the Straits of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy, while legend has it that Aristotle threatened to drown himself in the Euripus Strait between the island of Euboea and Boeotia in mainland Greece. He supposedly made this threat after observing the highly variable tides at the strait and unsuccessfully trying to come up with an explanation for how they worked. Aldersey-Williams explains that perhaps Aristotle was unsuccessful because the geography around the Euripus is such that the tides are starkly different in behavior between the north and south sides of the strait.
It is here where I stopped reading and moved back to Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us. When I had stopped last week, Carson had been talking about how the ocean changes seasonally. Now, she has moved on to the aphotic zone of the deep ocean, the part of the sea that's beyond the reaches of light coming from the surface.
I did not read far into Carson's book since I spent most of my time on The Tides, but I was once again struck by her vivid, cinematographic writing. I loved her description of how organisms change color as you go from the surface ocean down to the deep, and I love her word choices, like when she speaks of diatom meadows instead of diatom blooms. Also, after reading The Tides, I was struck by how much more scientifically dense Carson's work is: Her writing is peppered with footnotes on top of references to contemporary biologists, research methods, and the history of ocean research. This doesn't mean that The Tides is an inferior book: It just means that the tone and writing style are very different. Aldersey-Williams approaches his work as a layperson and Carson approaches hers as a marine biologist, but they both manage to communicate their experience of the oceans well, and I find both perspectives valuable.
I'll be blogging again about both books at the same time next week. Stay tuned!
References:
- Aldersey-Williams, H. (2016). The tide: The science and stories behind the greatest force on Earth. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
- Carson, R. L. (1951). The sea around us (1989 ed.). New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc.