The Wake of HMS Challenger - by Wood (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A scientific adventure story that dramatizes how profoundly our oceans have changed over the past 150 years

In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its goal: to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger's naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition's achievements are the stuff of legend. It identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench. It measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since. And, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS Challenger, Gillen D'Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.

The Challenger's scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encountered a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS Challenger offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet's final frontier.

Review Quotes

"[Gillen D'Arcy Wood] sets out to compare what these explorers found then and what they would find now in our climate- and pollution-raddled 21st century world. The news was never going to be great, but the concept makes for compelling reading."---Steve Weinman, Divernet

"A first rate, lively historical account of the fêted journey of the HMS Challenger. . . . Gillen D'Arcy Wood has rendered a great service to us all by chronicling the odyssey in so entertaining and illuminating a fashion."---David Gascoigne, Travels with Birds

"This book is a beautiful interweaving of stories that . . . enlighten the readers on the characteristics of the sea creatures that [the titular ship] discovered. Gillen D'Arcy Wood impeccably weaves the stories of the 19th century with our current understanding of the ocean today and implements the importance of ocean conservation."---Gabrielle Birchak, Math! Science! History!

"A vivid portrait of the ocean during its age of innocence and what has followed."-- "Kirkus Reviews"

"An invigorating environmental history."---Hannah Pearson, Foreword Reviews

About the Author

Gillen D'Arcy Wood is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice (both Princeton).