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By Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams

It pays to be nice. One of the most absolutely, emphatically wrong hypotheses about the oceans was coined by one of the most carefree and amiable people in nineteenth century science. It should have sunk his reputation without trace. Yet, it did not. He thought the deep oceans were stone cold dead and lifeless. They’re certainly not that. Even more amazingly, it was clear that the deep oceans were full of life even before he proposed his hypothesis — and yet the idea persisted for decades. He is still regarded as the father of marine biology. There’s a moral in that somewhere.

Edward Forbes was born a Manxman who early developed a love of natural history. He collected flowers, seashells, butterflies with a passion that saw him neglect, then fail dismally in, his studies: first as an artist (he had a fine talent for drawing) then as a doctor. He drifted into becoming some kind of itinerant naturalist who naturally shook things up around him. Going to the British Association meeting in Birmingham, he reacted to the formal atmosphere by decamping to a local pub, the Red Lion, and taking a good deal of the membership with him. There, fueled by beef and beer, they debated the great scientific ideas of the day. They expressed agreement or disagreement with debating points not by a show of hands, but growling like lions and fluttering their coat-tails (Forbes’s technique with the coat-tails was held up as a model for the younger Lions).

In 1841, Forbes was on board a surveying ship, the HMS Beacon, in the Mediterranean. He noticed that as they dredged in deeper waters, the dredge buckets brought up fewer types of marine organism. He extrapolated from that to propose the “azoic hypothesis” — that the deep oceans were dead. It seemed not unreasonable — as one climbs higher up mountains, life diminishes, then disappears. For it to do the same in the oceans would show a nice symmetry. The azoic hypothesis took hold.

The trouble was, even then, commercial ships — with sounding lines far longer than the Beacon’s dredge buckets could go — were occasionally pulling up starfish and other animals from as much as two kilometers down. That should have killed the azoic hypothesis stone dead. But it didn’t. As luck had it, the first reports of such things happened to be sent in by ship’s captains who were either known for telling tall tales or who were plain bad-tempered. They couldn’t compete with Forbes’s eloquence or charm.

It took quite a few years before the weight of evidence finally dragged down the azoic hypothesis. We now know that the Earth’s deep oceans are alive, the thriving communities sustained by a rain of nutrients from above. Edward Forbes’s brainchild is simply one of many of the ideas through which we have gained — tortuously — a better understanding of the Earth’s oceans.

There have been other extraordinary characters, too, involved in this story. The scientists who concocted the inspired lunacy of the American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC), for example, where every member automatically became a founding member, and where one of the rules was that there were no rules. Crazy as it was, AMSOC led to the Ocean Drilling Program, which revolutionized our knowledge of the deep ocean floors, of the history of global climate and of very much else. It’s also one of the great unsung revolutions of world science — but then there’s much that concerns the oceans that deserves to be more widely known.

There are extraordinary characters involved, too, in the new frontier of ocean science: the oceans that exist, or once existed, on other worlds. There’s the unfortunate Giordano Bruno, who imagined far-off worlds like our own — and who was burned at the stake for expounding these and other heresies. There’s Svante Arrhenius, who, a century ago, got Mars exactly right (no chance of canals, or water, he said) — but got Venus quite wrong (a thoroughly wet planet, he thought, and not the dry baking hell we now know it to be). There’s the wonderful mistake, too, of the contaminated detectors on a spacecraft on Venus — that led to the discovery of the oceans that likely once existed there.

We discover seas on other planets and moons, even as we still try to understand our own Earthly oceans. Just how have they lasted so long? And how will they change — in the next century, and in the next billion years? The story of oceans is really, truly never-ending.

Jan Zalasiewicz is Senior Lecturer in Geology and Mark Williams is Professor in Geology, both at the University of Leicester. They are also co-authors of Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets.

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Images: Underwater sea life – Public Domain via Pixabay. Jellyfish – Public Domain via Pixabay

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Project Seahorse Pamela S. Turner, photographs by Scott Tuascon

Once again, the Scientists in the Field series hits it out of the park.

Project Seahorse is a program that helps set up Marine Protected Areas off the coast of the Philippines. Seahorses are in trouble because there is a great demand for them-- dried seahorses are an important ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine and are also used for curios and knick-knacks. Live seahorses are very popular to use in aquariums, even though they are extremely hard to keep alive in captivity.

In addition to learning a lot about seahorses and coral reefs, Turner also shows why Project Seahorse is so successful as an organization.

The reason Project Seahorse works is because they work very closely with the communities who depend on the reefs for their livelihoods. By working closely with all of the players, they create very important buy-in, so everyone's on board with the project. One thing Project Seahorse works for isn't a complete ban on the seahorse trade, but a more sustainable one. Not only do they work with the fisherman, but also aquariums and Chinese medicine practitioners.

They also take a very interdisciplinary approach their conservation efforts. In addition to observing reef recovery by diving and counting and observing, the scientists also interview the fisherman to see if/how their catches are improving and work closely with them, not just for data, but so that they continue to support the project.

They hope that not only with the reef recover (and it's very much starting to) in the protected areas, but as it recovers, it spills out of the protected boundaries, bringing recovery to the unprotected areas as well (and the fisherman hope so, too.)

Also, the pictures are just FANTASTIC. Seahorses are weird little creatures and there are lots of cool pictures of them, but also of the other fish and life along the reef. Stunning. (My favorite was in the very back, of the weedy seadragon.)

As always, there is also a list for further reading, watching, and researching, as well as tips kids can do right now to help.

Another great book to show why this series is so awesome.

Round up is over at Write About Now. Be sure to check it out!

Book Provided by... my local library

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I've illustrated over a dozen books having to do with underwater themes.  I never thought I'd like the subject matter but have really become intrigued after doing so much research, talking with interesting marine biologists and learning so much.  Pretty cool!

Turtle Summer: A Journal for my Daughter
by Mary Alice Munroe; photographs and illustrations by Barbara J. Bergwerf

Once upon a Florida summer, I got to see a sea turtle nest as the last little hatchlings were scurrying toward the water. My midnight stroll on a beach got me there just in time to see the last straggler hit the surf and vanish into the black waters. I spent the rest of the weekend exploring the shoreline, noting the nests cordoned off by wildlife officials, who posted signs with the dates and species and the usual warnings.

Reading bestselling novelist Monroe's personal account of her "turtle summer" in South Carolina with her school-age daughter brought back the wonder and giddiness I felt even as an adult. She gives us one nest's chronology, laid out to resemble a scrapbook, but with Monroe's descriptive prose and tender touch.

Bergwerf is no stranger to loggerhead turtles, the featured species, but her photography is better showcased here, with sharp close-ups of all kinds of sea critters and shore birds, but her snapshots of mother and daughter tending the nest are still artless and perfunctory. She also created charcoal sketches of local flora on flecked paper that adds a rustic touch and deepens our understanding of the area.

It's still a lovely composition, matching facts and fancy, science and story, that's well worth a vicarious visit to the idyllic isle off South Carolina, where a mother and daughter patrol the beach in the pre-dawn hours searching for loggerhead nests.

Rating: *\*\*\

Why are the Ice Caps Melting? The Dangers of Global Warming
by Anne Rockwell; illustrated by Paul Meisel

In Arctic Waters
by Laura Crawford; illustrated by Ben Hodson

The hubby brought home a bootleg copy of “An Inconvenient Truth” recently and it proved an unlikely hit with Seth. His rave review convinced his preschool teacher to rent it. “The ice melting is really silly!” is about as profound as he gets, so he’s probably qualified to serve on a presidential panel.

Unlike that documentary, these two books are specifically aimed at kids. They arrived on the same day from separate publishers; I don’t know if I would’ve thought to pair them otherwise.

In Arctic Waters deals solely with the arctic food chain from a hapless fish to an Inuit hunter using cumulative verses. Crawford weaves together facts on each creature into each rhyming stanza. We meet one after another, building suspense through repetition as we sweat it out for that poor fish.

Hodson also brings a naturalist's eye to animal movement and expression that steers clear of cutesy while anthropomorphising the creatures enough to make them more appealing to kids.

As with most Sylvan Dell titles, there's a section in the back with more facts and an activity. No, there's no global warming, but a few reads and your kid will get a sense of what we're losing when you hit him or her with Ice Caps.

Rating: *\*\

I wish the folks at HarperCollins who publish this Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out series would take a page from Sylvan Dell: scientific books for kids needn’t be so dry. Both titles have been vetted by the appropriate scientists and wildlife experts, both are painstakingly researched, but you really feel it with Ice Caps.

It covers the same territory as Al Gore, but not as fun, if you can believe it. Its graphics can't compete with animation of a drowning polar bear or Matt Groening's cartoon of a thuggish mob of pollutants. It does a yoeman's job of describing global warming's causes and how we can do our part to lessen the damage.

I say pair it with the arctic book or the documentary to mask its narrative flaws and drive the point home. It's still the most factual treatment I've seen on this controversial subject.

Though I have a couple nits to pick with Ice Caps. It gives too much credence to the naysayers and nutjobs who don't believe in global warming.

It also makes no mention that the number one source of greenhouse gases isn’t cars or trash; it’s decomposing poop from livestock. That seems like a big fact to leave out.

Rating: *\*\