Book review of Ocean by Asha de Vos

In her introduction, Sri Lankan marine biologist Asha de Vos calls Ocean: From the Shore to the Abyss a love letter to the ocean and “an attempt to shine a light on some of the most exciting aspects of the deep blue, from tiny creatures to marine giants, dark trenches to colourful corals, rusting shipwrecks to cutting-edge marine-inspired inventions.” This is not simply a chronicle of oceanic knowledge, although it certainly is that. Ocean is also a beautifully illustrated treasury of weird, exciting and often unseen aspects of the water that covers almost two-thirds of the earth’s surface.

The book’s subtitle points to its six organizing categories, among them The Shore and The Abyss, each further divided into subsections. Rather than overwhelming, the structure makes the material feel approachable, with information broken into chunks as digestible as a high-end magazine. A photographic spread of various types of microscopic plankton seems both futuristic and prehistoric, looking at once like ghostly Tron characters and excavated fossils. A chapter called “The Ocean’s Singers: Humpback Whales” includes sonogram transcriptions of whale songs that look more like a marine Rosetta Stone than traditional musical composition. The corresponding text summarizes everything scientists know about the songs, which De Vos explains is still limited. “While humpback whale songs are some of the best studied in the underwater world,” she writes, “they are also a gentle reminder that we still have so much to learn.”

The word I keep returning to when considering this book is captivating. Ocean is a lush volume that is as hard to put down as the best kinds of pulp novels, but highly recommended for science lovers as well as people interested in environmentalism, nature photography and deep-sea exploration.