THE WAKE OF HMS CHALLENGER

The expedition that founded modern oceanography.

Wood, author of Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World, writes that in 1872 the British Royal Society sent the Royal Navy frigate HMS Challenger on a four-year scientific voyage around the world. Thousands of new species turned up along with previously unknown environments, including the largest of all: the oceans below 600 feet, where light cannot reach and which earlier experts agreed were lifeless. Many books describe the expedition, but Wood adds a significant detail. In addition to navigation and housekeeping stories (not terribly relevant but entertaining), temperature, current, and seafloor recordings—as well as the deluge of creatures emerging from the depths whose descriptions filled 50 volumes of scientific reports—he advances the clock from those last days of the preindustrial ocean to the present. Fish stocks, once considered inexhaustible, are no such thing. Ninety percent of those in the upper levels of the food chain are gone. The Atlantic cod fishery collapsed in the 1990s and shows no signs of recovering. Industrial trawling sucks up billions of fish, and dragging equipment is devastating, “transforming millions of acres of teeming, plant-rich seabed into sandy underwater desert.” Most readers are aware of the torrent of plastic pouring into the ocean, 92% of it microplastic, destined for the sea floor and the stomachs of the creatures who roam it. A bonanza of precious metal and rare earths lies on the bottom, and deep-sea mining, now technically feasible, will soon begin. Fear of massive destruction of the already damaged seafloor is a concern, and few readers will be reassured by entrepreneurs’ assurances that they will be careful.

A vivid portrait of the ocean during its age of innocence and what has followed.