Book Readings: Week 3

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.

I will spend most of this week's blog post discussing Carson's book, since most of last week's post was spent on The Tides by Aldersey-Williams. This week in The Sea Around Us, Carson is focusing on creatures of the deep ocean, past where light can penetrate.

The first thing that stands out to me about Carson's discussion of the deep ocean is how technology has helped the advancement of the marine sciences since the publication of The Sea Around Us. This edition of Carson's book includes footnotes she wrote ten years after the first edition (published in 1951), and the section on the deep ocean in particular is full of footnotes discussing advances in knowledge of the deep ocean that had been made in that short timeframe. I was struck both by how much scientists didn't know about the oceans in 1951, and by how much they already did know. One of the things I was surprised to find that scientists knew about already in 1951 was the existence of snapping shrimp that use their large claws to make a snapping sound. These shrimp were discovered with the use of hydrophones that recorded their snapping noises.

I was also impressed by how much was learned in the ten years between the first edition and the updated 1961 edition. For instance, Carson mentions in her footnotes the fact that new science was emerging that confirmed the use of sonar/echolocation by marine mammals to find food. Another fun fact she mentions is the capture of a second live coelacanth specimen in 1952, after the first one was discovered in 1938.

Carson's asserts that life probably began in the surface oceans, coastal waters, rivers, and swamps, and not in the interior of continents or the interior of the ocean, which she defines as the deep ocean or abyss. I found this interesting because it seems to tie in to the concept of ecotones, which we learned about in our Marine Resources class. Ecotones are transition areas between two ecosystems, and these boundary areas tend to be places of high biological productivity and activity.

After this section, Carson moves on to discuss the topography of the ocean floor, from submarine canyons, to seamounts, trenches, and mid-ocean ridges. Again, I was struck by how much of this section was dependent on technologies that were emerging at the time which allowed for new information about the ocean floor to be uncovered.

As always, I was really taken by Carson's cinematographic descriptions. I loved reading about a "phantom ocean bottom" which was discovered by sonar and which was found to change its depth depending on the time of day. This phantom bottom consisted of a layer of living organisms that rose from the depths at night to feed, while retreating to the deep during the day. Initial explorations of the oceans by sonar, which was being used to sound the depths of the ocean floor, revealed the existence of this layer.

Carson's references to descriptions of bioluminescent squid were also fascinating, as were her descriptions of Architeuthis (the giant squid) and the deep blue of the ocean waters at a depth of 1,000 feet. I also really loved learning about Dogger Bank, a productive fishing area in the North Sea that used to be a strip of land connecting the British Isles to the European mainland during the last ice age. Finally, I found it interesting that Carson mentions the origin of man and evolution as if it were totally non-controversial: It's truly a shame that the public's knowledge and acceptance of evolution in the US seems to have actually declined since 1951, instead of getting better.

After reading Carson's work this week, with its heavy emphasis on the technologies that have assisted in the advancement of knowledge about the ocean (e.g. hydrophones, submarines, and the use of sonar to sound the ocean depths), it felt like a sharp change of tone to switch to Aldersey-Williams' book. This week in The Tide, Aldersey-Williams focuses on the history and legends surrounding the tides:

The author begins by talking about Cnut the Great (or Canute the Great), who was the first and only Danish King of England in the 11th century. Aldersey-Williams recounts a legend about how Cnut took his sycophantic nobles, who claimed that he even had control over the waves and the tides, down to the ocean to observe the waters and prove that he was at the mercy of natural forces–forces which he believed to be the work of his Christian god–just as much as every other person was. The cultural relevance of Cnut is revealed when Aldersey-Williams talks about how coastal businesses in North Carolina successfully lobbied to have all references to sea level rise removed from state legislation, prompting one blog to sarcastically comment that King Canute was unavailable for comment on North Carolina's actions.

Aldersey-Williams then gets into the etymology of the tides. He tells his readers that the word came from the Anglo-Saxon word "tíd," which primarily was used to refer to the passing of a significant amount of time. This meant that the word could also be used to refer to the rhythms of the sea's rising and falling. However, the author points out that more commonly, tides were referred to as "flood" and "ebb." Combinations of these words were used to express more specific kinds of tides, such as "neapflood" for neap tide, "fullflood" for spring tide, "highflood" for high tide, and so on.

This was as far as I went into The Tide this week. Although it was a sharp change of tone from Carson's technology-heavy descriptions of the ocean, it was a nice change of pace to get into the history and etymology of the tides. I'm enjoying reading these two books together because I feel like I'm getting a more holistic, multidisciplinary look at the oceans by doing so.

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.