77 Books Like The Science of the Ocean

This book opened my eyes to the ocean world and its huge significance for the future of our planet. In scratchy font across its black cover, it read: “To industry it’s tin, aluminium, oil, gas, sulfur, iron, coal, phosphorites, manganese, diamonds and gold. To fisheries it’s £3,000,000,000 per year. To military and political interests, it’s battlefields and missile bases. To you and me it’s a breath of fresh air and a nice place to make a splash.”

These words resonated with me as a young PhD student of ocean science in Canada. It was the early 1970s. We were optimistic. The UN had just adopted a resolution that stated, “the seabed and ocean floor…are the common heritage of mankind.” The book may be out of print, but its message is as vital as ever.

This is a refreshing and very contemporary account of the changing face of our oceans. Despite the nearly five decades I have dedicated to ocean research, Helen Scales’ book provided me with new, intriguing insights and a wealth of fascinating factoids. More importantly, I welcome her positive and optimistic outlook for the future, following a candid assessment of just how much we have already affected a world we know so little about.

The oceans have changed many times in the geological past through natural Earth processes, and they will continue to adapt to whatever we impose. However, Helen argues with cogent elegance that we could still mitigate our worst excesses and work collectively for an environmentally sustainable ocean future.   

This is an enthralling tale of first-hand research at sea, of perilous work in the ‘screaming 60s’ around Antarctica, and the sheer delight and humility gained from making new discoveries in a world so few have ever seen and where exploration is still in its infancy.

I have experienced exactly that thrill and awe. My own research specialty is the deep ocean–the shape of the seafloor and the stories of sediment swept in to cover it. Alex Rogers is a leading specialist in marine biology, so I was intrigued to read his account of The Deep. Most importantly, Alex explores the ocean’s impact on all our lives, the dramatic effects of our use and abuse of the seas, and of what we might do to mitigate unnecessary damage in the future. Thought-provoking!

Beyond the intrigue of scientific study, for me, the sea has always been a place of living poetry – sparkling, changing, and dramatic in equal measure. This mesmerising poetry collection by Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda, together with his Stones of the Sky, is an all-time favourite of mine.

In August 1991, I sat on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, across from Neruda’s oceanside home in Chile’s Valparaiso, and watched the most vivid, enchanting colours of a setting sun, fuelled by atmospheric ash still lingering from Mt. Pinatubo’s violent eruption many weeks before in the Philippines. Neruda’s poetry captures such earth and ocean dramas with such vibrancy. For poets and scientists alike, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I was particularly attracted to this book because it was one of the first works to provide a timely reminder of the fragility and centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it.

This enduring work, published over six decades ago, makes an important case for the primacy of the ocean. I was first exposed to this book at a relatively young age, and its profound influence shaped my future endeavors in ocean science.

Even as an oceanographer myself, I was transfixed and transported by this book. And I loved hearing about the author’s own explorations to the deep. I love the pieces of deepsea exploration history that are in this book; that blew me away, even as someone who has contributed to exploration myself!

I loved the plotlines better than any movie or TV drama, for sure! And not only is the prose thrilling, ethereal, and beautiful, but it has helped me to renew my strength, as a foot soldier in the environmental call to action that is a huge part of this story.

Full disclosure: I still haven’t seen the National Geographic special, but I’ll go down arguing the book is better (much as I do love David Attenborough films). This book is something of a tome, but it’s so engagingly written that it had me up well past my bedtime night after night. 

I’ve always been intrigued by our oceans – one of my first great childhood heroes was Jacques Cousteau – but the true charm of this book is its boundless hope. It would be easy to fall into despair and catastrophization writing a book that deals so intimately with climate change, but instead, there is example after example of people who live as full participants in the cycle of life, not observers of it, whose footsteps beat a path to a world where we all flourish together.

It’s a little unbelievable to think how much we have learned about the ocean since Jacques Cousteau’s time, primarily because of his inventive spirit and incurable passion to share his explorations with the rest of us. How lucky are we?

Manfish is a great introduction to his many discoveries and life story for kids.

The title Neptune’s Laboratory invokes knowledge of the oceans through science alongside the equally central role imagination has played in the human relationship with the sea. Antony Adler astutely observes how its mirror-like qualities encouraged scientists, politicians, and the public since the early 19th century to use the ocean to spin utopian fantasies and explore dystopian fears. Most importantly, he reminds readers that our propensity to fathom oceans to project the fate of the human species and our planet offers an important key: imagination could chart a course toward a better future.

Eugenie Clark wrote this book about the early days of her amazing career as a marine biologist and shark specialist (she was later nicknamed the ‘Shark Lady’). In the 1940s, not only was she unusual for being a female scientist, but she set off on intrepid journeys around the world, studying fish around tiny islands across the Pacific and in the Red Sea, long before it was developed as a tourist destination. This book gives a glorious view of a pioneering scientist and what ocean science used to be like. I was lucky enough to meet her a few years before she died in her nineties. She was incredibly warm and generous, and was clearly still driven by the same boundless curiosity and adventurous spirit that you will see written across the pages of her book.