The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World

All of Earth's oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight; a blue machine. This engine shunts huge flows of energy, water, life and raw materials around the world. Humans have travelled on its upper surface for millennia, foraging for the food supplies hidden in its depths, living inside the weather it generates, and breathing in what the ocean breathes out. We are absolutely dependent upon it, but we almost never talk about how the ocean itself works. We generally even forget that there's anything to know - our outsider's view of this vast and complex domain is painfully limiting. What we need is the perspective from the inside - and that is the story this book will tell.

Drawing on her own work on the physics of the ocean, Dr Helen Czerski will explain that it has shaped the course of human history - its currents have dictated the location of cities, we've ridden its waves and plundered its resources - but that now, for the first time, we can now see it for what it is: a vast engine, on a planetary scale, converting the energy credit of the sun into weather, movement and life. Timely, elegantly explained and passionately argued, this book - like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction, or Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life - will recalibrate the its way readers see the world.