A View of the Sea

Rating:
Summary: An amazing experience
Review: Being myself an oceanographer (PhD), this book surprisingly came to me by chance. I knew the author and his work as much as I have never heard of this amazing small book, and I left it lying about on my desk during a couple of weeks before thinking about its reading. I was initially not enthusiastic, expecting another "boring" theoretical textbook on the ocean circulation. But to my surprise, the book is a fun read. Written as a dialogue it leads the reader to deal with concepts that otherwise could have been really difficult to apprehend for non specialists. Here no equations, mathematical terms or esoteric scientific thinking. On the contrary, here science is fun, really fun, intuitive and really understandable for everybody. This book is really more than a popularization book, it does not even seem to deal with scientific things! It is just an informal discussion between two persons with two different passionate views of the sea, including some fun anecdotes undeceiving scientific work at sea, but nevertheless very strong scientific thinking on the functioning of the ocean circulation and the amazing feeling of the author enthusiasm for his work. More specifically, some computer programs devoted to the visualization of different ocean circulation patterns can be found in annex, and could still, almost 15 years after their initial writing, be an excellent starting point for undergraduate and graduate students on ocean sciences. This book is a wonderful experience I highly recommend to anybody wants to have an easy, but complete "view on the sea".

Rating:
Summary: Great book, but maybe too complicated for non-oceanographers
Review: I was drawn to this book principally because of my fascination with Henry Stommel, but it could very well be my favorite of his books. This is definitely a science book; the premise is that a scientist (Stommel) is on a scientific cruise to confirm the existence of a particular current flow structure known as the beta spiral, and he attempts to explain this to the chief engineer of the ship.

But in order to explain the significance of the spiral, he has a lot of basic material to go over, so what you get is a brilliant discussion of most of the fundamental concepts of geophysical fluid dynamics. The great thing is that he explains these ideas with almost no equations. Only my personal background made me aware that he was describing phenomena such as the so-called "geostrophic" or "thermal wind" balances. His graphical descriptions are powerful, and have helped me to understand these concepts on a much more intimate level. The book even goes beyond the cruise and the beta spiral, and gives some exposure to modern thermocline theory and ocean modeling.

I was a little misled by the title. I had expected to get an oceanographer's view of the ocean and how this contrasted with the sailor's view. But I don't think there's much of a "conversation" between Stommel and the engineer. The bulk of the book is mainly about Stommel telling the engineer how the ocean works. Even when the engineer "tries his hand", it's still a discussion of the ocean, and very similar to Stommel's approach.

Also, I have to admit that I found a number of the issues in the book to be very challenging. I often had to stop and mull over his words. As an oceanographer-in-training, I'm more than happy to do this, but a more casual reader may get fed up and stop reading. This book may be better suited as a supplement text to a physical oceanography course.

But this is still an amazing book, and conveys some of the excitement of what is probably considered by many to be a very boring subject! Hopefully a few people will pick this up and realize that we don't need to look to the stars or the atoms to find compelling mysteries in our universe.