Subtitle: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution
Author: David M. Lawrence
Subject: Science and Society/History of Medicine and Science
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3028-8
Pages: 256 pp., 27 b&w illus.
Description: A lively history of the plate tectonics revolution, the ocean floor studies that fueled it, and the personalities behind a scientific upheaval.
The deep oceans are the last great frontier remaining on earth. Humans have conquered the vast wilderness of the terrestrial surface, from the searing deserts and dark forests of the tropics to the icy polar regions. Today, anyone with enough ambition and money can travel upriver into the heart of the Borneo jungle, climb Mount Everest, or spend the night at the South Pole. But the oceans beyond the continental shelves remain forbidding, beyond the reach of science, adventure, and commerce.
Not long ago, scientists viewed the ocean floor as a vast, featureless plain, an ancient repository of detritus eroded from the surface of an unchanging earth. Light never reached the seemingly lifeless depths. The ocean basins were only of marginal scholarly interest. This all changed with the Herculean quest to discover what lay on the world's ocean floora quest that inspired the continental driftplate tectonics revolution and overturned prevailing scientific notions of how the earths surface was created, rearranged, and destroyed.
Upheaval from the Abyss spans a 130-year period, beginning with the early,
backbreaking efforts to map the depths during the age of sail; continuing with improvements in research methods spurred by maritime disaster and war; and culminating in the publication of the first map of the worlds ocean floor in 1977. The author brings this tale to life by weaving through it the personalities of the scientist-explorers who struggled to see the face of the deep, and reveals not only the bare facts of how the ocean floor was mapped, but also the human dimensions of what the scientists experienced and felt while in the process.
Click here to read an interview with the author of Upheaval from the Abyss.
David M. Lawrence is a freelance journalist.
Excerpt from Upheaval from the Abyss
"The researchers life, as I and many others have lived it, is usually characterized by long periods of repetitive, mind-numbing drudgery broken (we hope) by brief explosions of revolutionary insight and frenetic activity. It is similar to the life of a soldier at war, andat timescan be just as fatal to the participants. . . . I believe that it is as important to remember the day-to-day human experience as it is to remember ideas, data, and debate. Knowing about the drudgery and danger adds to, rather than detracts from, the history of science. Thus, I have striven to re-create what it is like to be on or under the ocean surface, combating cantankerous equipment or furious weather in the hope of extracting a few precious observations from the deep. I have tried to reveal how some researchers struggled for years inside small labs to digest the increasing flood of information about Neptunes realm, and how others harvested the tide to revolutionize our understanding of the earths history." from Upheaval from the Abyss: Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution
