The Blue Machine

By Helen Czerski,

Book cover of The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Blue Machine as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

How can you not love a book that argues that, despite being mostly microbial, “the plankton form the bulk of the living fabric of the ocean, the web of life that is an integral part of the blue machine.”

Czerski’s prose is as vivid as describing other, larger parts of the blue machine, such as Greenland sharks, which live for hundreds of years, and whales whose earwax records the stress caused by global warming. Equally entertaining and captivating are her accounts of canoeing off Maui, fieldwork in the Arctic, and everyday life on an oceanographic ship.

Although the writing is…

From David's list on microbes and the environment.

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