Fathoming the Ocean

The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea

Helen M. Rozwadowski

276 pages, parution le 17/03/2005

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Résumé

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as scientists explored the frontiers of polar regions and the atmosphere, the ocean remained silent and inaccessible. The history of how this changed--of how the depths became a scientific passion and a cultural obsession, an engineering challenge and a political attraction--is the story that unfolds in Fathoming the Ocean.

In a history at once scientific and cultural, Helen Rozwadowski shows us how the Western imagination awoke to the ocean's possibilities--in maritime novels, in the popular hobby of marine biology, in the youthful sport of yachting, and in the laying of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The ocean emerged as important new territory, and scientific interests intersected with those of merchant-industrialists and politicians. Rozwadowski documents the popular crazes that coincided with these interests--from children's sailor suits to the home aquarium and the surge in ocean travel. She describes how, beginning in the 1860s, oceanography moved from yachts onto the decks of oceangoing vessels, and landlubber naturalists found themselves navigating the routines of a working ship's physical and social structures.

Fathoming the Ocean offers a rare and engaging look into our fascination with the deep sea and into the origins of oceanography--origins still visible in a science that focuses the efforts of physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, and engineers on the common enterprise of understanding a vast, three-dimensional, alien space.

L'auteur - Helen M. Rozwadowski

Helen M. Rozwadowski is Assistant Professor of History and Coodinator of Maritime Studies, University of Connecticut at Avery Point.

Sommaire

Foreword by Sylvia Earle
Fathoming the Fathomless
The Undiscovered Country
Soundings
A Sea Breeze
Dredging the Moon
Small World
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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Caractéristiques techniques

	PAPIER
Éditeur(s)	The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Auteur(s)	Helen M. Rozwadowski
Parution	17/03/2005
Nb. de pages	276
Format	17 x 24
Couverture	Relié
Poids	569g
Intérieur	Noir et Blanc
EAN13	9780674016910
ISBN13	978-0-674-01691-0