Nov 22, 2023
Just finished “The Blue Machine – How the Ocean Works” by Helen Czerski.
As you can guess, it is a non-fiction title, another scientist commenting on a topic dear to her and meaningful for most of us, a genre I’m finding attractive in my old age
She’s a physicist whose work on bubbles at Scripp’s took her into oceanography. She shares her journey and imparts a good deal of material through her writing. Discussions center on the divers of the ocean currents, salinity, density, and temperature and how they impact continents and global weather, sea and land life cycles. It isn’t a small book but considering what she is covering it is concise at 446 pages with addendums.
She writes her story of the ocean and how it works without bringing our changes to the systems into it until after we understand it. Then the book ends with some meaningful and disheartening statistics on the devastation we’ve unleashed on this big machine. While whaling and over fishing and guano extraction have had some impacts in the past, today’s combination of warming, CO2, plastics and pollution are bringing about much different impacts and ones we really don’t understand today. For example; to take the global temperature of the ocean is almost impossible, as is measuring the global PH, fisheries and plant life, but she gives as good an estimation as she can to bring home the changes measured today.
Good adult reading, I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to gain knowledge of this system.
From my library:
All of Earth’s oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials. In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes. Through stories of history, culture, and animals, she explains how water temperature, salinity, gravity, and the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates all interact in a complex dance, supporting life at the smallest scale–plankton–and the largest–giant sea turtles, whales, humankind. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves, to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she introduces the messengers, passengers, and voyagers that rely on interlinked systems of vast currents, invisible ocean walls, and underwater waterfalls. Most important, however, Czerski reveals that while the ocean engine has sustained us for thousands of years, today it is faced with urgent threats. By understanding how the ocean works, and its essential role in our global system, we can learn how to protect our blue machine. Timely, elegant, and passionately argued, The Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet”