Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World

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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, Science magazine Thanks to NetGalley and W. W. Norton & Company for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. That still accounts for just a small fraction of the ocean, an interconnected mass of salt water thousands of miles in extent. As anyone who has looked properly at a globe, or studied the pictures of our planet from space, knows, water covers almost three-quarters of the Earth’s surface. And although on a planetary scale it is just a smear of moisture, it is still deep beyond human ken – the average depth of the whole lot is 3.68 kilometres. Down there, there are water movements vaster than empires and more slow, currents of matter and energy with a global reach. Timely, elegant and passionately argued, The Blue Machine is one of the biggest stories ever told. 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 this complex force, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine. 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 scientist’s exploration of the “ocean engine”—the physics behind the ocean’s systems—and why it matters. 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."

Czerski is a wonderful writer ... Blue Machine really does change the way you see the world.' Daily Mail While it was all good and entertaining, the author really found her voice in Part Three of the book: The Blue Machine and Us. It was also in this section that I found the real flaws of this book as well. I get that 'the road to disaster is paved with good intentions' and that the ocean is so complex, and there's no way to begin to harness hydropower without having unintended consequences. However, in then in the next line- "one thing we know for sure is that we need to wean ourselves off greenhouse gasses." The author making the point that we need to learn how to live with the ocean, but doesn't want that to have unintended consequences, but also recognizes the need for somewhat drastic change because humanities current course of action is having disastrous effects on our environment, but doesn't want to propose any recommendations.

All of Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight - a blue machine. The blue of Earth is a gigantic engine, a dynamic liquid power- house that stretches around our planet and is connected to every part of our lives. It has components on every scale, from the mighty Gulf Stream gliding across the Atlantic to the tiny bub- bles bursting at the top of a breaking wave. This is a beautiful, elegant, tightly woven system, full of surprising connections and profound consequences. The complexity can seem over- whelming, but at the largest scale, the logic is straightforward.” Most of us have a very superficial relationship with the ocean. If we deign to visit it all, we transgress mainly into its uppermost layers. We boat or sail on the surface occasionally interacting with some of its top tier predators such as whales, porpoises, orcas, sharks, or seals. As a society we use the ocean as a source of protein, or we use it as a garbage dump. Out of sight, out of mind as the saying goes. Yet the Oceans comprise 70% of the surface area of the earth and 97% of all the water on the planet. They are the places where life began and evolved for over three billion years. It is where we come from. The dynamic currents and energy mass of the oceans affect the climates of all the continents. The complex oceanic ecosystems not only provide us with protein but profoundly affect the livability of our atmosphere. To read Helen Czerski is to take a fascinating dive below the waves as she tries to explain the complex workings of our blue planet’s blue machine, how it makes our planet a haven for life and also the catastrophic dangers we face by over exploiting and destabilizing its complex ecosystems.Lively and engrossing [...] 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' [...] [Cerzski's personal experience of both Polynesian canoes off Hawaii and ice floes near the North Pole is not icing on the cake but part of the argument of this excellent and important book." 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.

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 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.

Book Summary

Czerski's] profound, sparkling global ocean voyage mingles history and culture, natural history, geography, animals and people. Andrew Robinson, Nature