<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Heir to Galileo
Review: I had the pleasure of sailing with Cindy van Dover during 1985's Argo-RISE expedition to the Galapagos Rift. She probably recalls that I spent much of that oceanographic expedition annoying everyone with my overly-enthisiastic babble about what was then perceived as every oceanographer's chief competition for funding - the space program. Even under threats that if I didn't stop, I might end up "sleeping with the fishes," I could not stop talking about Valkyrie rockets and the moons of Jupiter. Cindy's hydrothermal vents have turned out to be much more important than most people realize. Sub-surface, vent-sustained seas have been all but confirmed under the ice of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede. They probably also reside inside Saturn's Enceladus and Titan, and they are suspected under Callisto and Mars. Looking outward from our Earth, it now appears that most life in the universe exists near deep ocean vents, and that worlds with their habitable zones on the outside are so rare as to make we surface dwellers a galactic minority, if not downright freakish. This book is simply the most detailed single overview yet produced on what history may ultimately regard as one of biology's (and astrobiology's) most important discoveries - which makes Cindy van Dover more akin to Galileo than to William Beebe or Sylvia Earle. Cindy was partly responsible for turning my attention down from space, for more than a decade, and into more "earthy" subjects such as archaeology. I have to apologize to her though, for that little brawl I almost caused before the expedition; what a way to learn never, never to get so excited about submersibles and robot probes that I shout, in a diner full of non-oceanographer teamsters and lumber jacks, "I can't wait to go down on ALVIN!"
Rating:
Summary: excellent overview of hydrothermal systems
Review: I'm a biochemist who has started to work in the area of vent microbiology, and this book has served as an essential reference of vent ecology and basic vent geology for me - an excellent, readable book.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, in depth and well written text
Review: This book rates along with the standard texts by Marshall, Herring and Tyler that should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the biology of the deep sea. It brings the disparate biological, geological and biochemical hydrothermal vent literature together brilliantly. My only criticisms of the text are a lack of attention to the potentially damaging effects of scientific investigations on hydrothermal vents and propogation of the myth that deep-sea shrimps are able to see black-body radiation.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent, in depth and well written text
Review: This book rates along with the standard texts by Marshall, Herring and Tyler that should be on the shelves of anyone interested in the biology of the deep sea. It brings the disparate biological, geological and biochemical hydrothermal vent literature together brilliantly. My only criticisms of the text are a lack of attention to the potentially damaging effects of scientific investigations on hydrothermal vents and propogation of the myth that deep-sea shrimps are able to see black-body radiation.
<< 1 >>
| 
