Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World

Product Information

This is a fascinating book about the ocean and how it shapes our world, how it impacts our lives and how it helps us today. The author does include science in this book, but it is explained in a way that is completely understandable to a non-science-brained person. Helen Czerski's absorbing Storm in a Teacup stands head and shoulders above other popular science books. Irish TImes

Czerski argues throughout that to truly see the miraculous oceans, to understand and to feel our connection to them, is vital and integral to our history and our future. Her outstanding book advances that understanding and honours that connection. Her readers will see the seas anew.

Reader Reviews

In Helen Czerski's hands, the mechanical becomes magical. An instant classic." - Tristan Gooley, author of How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea I love Helen Czerski's writing, and this is her richest work yet - as clear as springwater, yet as filled with fascinating things as the ocean itself. Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live and Humanly Possible It all adds up to a persuasive case that Earth-dwellers need to understand the ocean and work with it, a message that gains urgency from the way people are now changing the whole system. More than 90 per cent of all the extra energy our atmosphere has trapped as we have increased its load of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is stored in ocean waters as heat. That is affecting the whole, vast, intricate, machine, with untoward effects on climate and ecosystems. A fascinating dive into the essential engine that drives our world. Czerski brings the oceans alive with compelling stories that masterfully navigate this most complex system. Gaia Vince Czerski’s fascinating new b

THE TIMES SCIENCE BOOK OF THE YEAR: 'This beautifully written, sweeping guide shows how the deep movement of the seas have ruled our lives in unexpected ways over millennia.' A dazzle of stories beautifully told...Czerski argues throughout that to truly see the miraculous oceans, to understand and to feel our connection to them, is vital and integral to our history and our future. Her outstanding book advances that understanding and honours that connection. Her readers will see the seas anew. Horatio Clare, Telegraph

Advance Praise

An extraordinary & captivating read on oceans, revealing their profound influence on our world. Czerski's approach to oceanography is extensively eye-opening yet accessible, making this book an essential read for everyone to understand the intricate interplay between the ocean, climate, ecosystems, & human civilisation. Helen Czerski's fascinating new book casts the ocean as an extraordinary giant engine, and helps us grasp its complex physicsand its key role in climate change Graham Lawton, New Scientist BOOK OF THE WEEK: This beautifully written, sweeping guide shows how the deep movement of the seas have ruled our lives in unexpected ways over millennia. Tom Whipple, The Times

Helen Czerski weaves together physics and biology, history and science, in a beautifully poetic way. Fascinating, funny and deeply moving. From vast currents and tides to the smallest creatures that inhabit our oceans she reveals the spellbinding wonder of the oceans. From the opening paragraph, I was entranced. Professor Alice RobertsEarth is home to a huge story that is rarely told - that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture. This is the spectacular story of Earth's dynamic ocean. I absolutely concede there are scientific processes and chemical composition and reactions in the ocean that are reliable, verifiable and replicable. That doesn’t make it a machine. Maybe what she meant was power or energy. If each wave was a machine, or a heart was a machine, or a brain was a machine, then we could replicate them and there would be exact copies we could master and control and evolution shows us time and time again that is a delusion. When next you go to the sea, study the colour of your bit of the global ocean. “The cool water off Nova Scotia is a foggy turquoise,” Helen Czerski writes, “lit by diffuse sunlight above and fading into darkness below. The fog is made up of tiny fragments of drifting organic life, individually invisible but collectively cloaking every resident in fuzzy ignorance of everything more than five metres away.” Timely, elegant and passionately argued, Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. The understanding it offers is crucial to our future. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of marine science, Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of Earth's defining feature, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine. Riveting.... The cultural history fascinates.... Wide-ranging and meticulously detailed, this captures the wonder, beauty, and intrigue of its subject.

Helen Czerski weaves together physics and biology, history and science, in a beautifully poetic way. Fascinating, funny, and deeply moving. From vast currents and tides to the smallest creatures that inhabit our oceans she reveals the spellbinding wonder of the oceans. From the opening paragraph, I was entranced." - Professor Alice Roberts The Blue Machine is a point of departure, a map for further exploration. Not since reading The Diversity of Life by E.O. Wilson have I read a book as timely, salient, and informative. Todd L Capson, ScienceAlthough I was looking forward to the chapter on “voyagers” – and Czerski is passionate on the Hawaiian and Polynesian arts of canoeing and navigating at sea – it contains the only error I could identify. Comparing the operation of a sailing ship with that of a steamer or motorised vessel, and lamenting the loss of the human-ocean connection that tall ships demand of their crews, she writes: She says for that that want change, readers should write to their elected officials. What I am interested in hearing, after reading her book, is what does she recommend they write? If we were to ask our politicians to support an initiative/write a bill/fund a program, what does she believe is worth it? Lively and engrossing.... Czerski is an exceptionally able guide.... Alongside her vivid portrayal of waters sliding over one another, colliding, mixing and turning into ice or water vapour, she explains how the living beings within the sea also form part of the ‘blue machine’.... [An] excellent and important book.