Wild seas, high seas, mapping the bottom and determining where the top really is – ocean-focused books published this year cover an incredible range, both literally and metaphorically.
Here are some of our favourite ocean reads from 2024. Tell us what we missed and should add to our reading lists on Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn and Bluesky.
What the Wild Sea Can Be – Helen Scales
A sea change has unfolded beneath the vast surface of the ocean over the last few hundred million years. In her latest book, marine biologist Helen Scales rewinds the clock to sketch out this shift, starting with the trilobites that swam, crawled and drifted in ancient seas. Swimming reptiles – including sea-monster-like ichthyosaurs – claimed marine dominance until the Permian extinction, which also led to the overthrow of the dinosaurs, hit some 250 million years ago. Scales dusts off this tumultuous, pre-human past to offer a sobering lesson about the current state of our ocean, and its potential future.
A mass extinction is currently underway. “Whichever way you slice the data, the rate of extinction is now far higher” than the normal rate shown in the fossil record, she writes. In today’s climate and biodiversity crisis, some species will win, and others will lose. The rapidly spreading, adaptive lionfish remains strong in the changing ocean, boldly cruising in non-native waters. On the other hand, emperor penguins frown at Antarctica’s disappearing sea ice, which is critical to raising their offspring.
Responding to the unfolding calamity, humans, again, endeavour to “invent their way out of trouble”, Scales notes. They advance innovative plans such as floating cities and mining the deep sea. But Scales prefers to let the ocean do its thing – to regenerate and recover on its own. To allow that, humanity has to restrain itself and occasionally offer it a helping hand. This includes by reintroducing species, curbing industrial fisheries and no longer treating the ocean as a forgiving dumping ground for plastics and sewage, she suggests.
Zestful and imaginative, the book shines a much-needed light on the hope for our ocean, alerting us that the wheel steering its course is in our hands.
– Regina Lam
The High Seas – Olive Heffernan
Like many who write about the ocean, Olive Heffernan starts by describing a childhood within reach of the sea. But her journey has taken her far offshore: this book explores the “unclaimed ocean” that lies beyond the control of individual nations.
Heffernan, a journalist who founded the Nature Climate Change journal and has contributed to Dialogue Earth among other outlets, first headed to the high seas in 2001. In this deeply readable book, she takes us on a voyage with a motley collection of people, ships and creatures in a place that, as she says, most people will only see from aeroplane windows. Her book details how this zone is not the lawless space of popular imagination, but a realm overseen by a “mish-mash of organisations and bodies”, many of which “wilfully ignore science and disregard expert advice”. This has left much of the high seas under-protected in a time of widespread overfishing, seabed mining attempts and huge ecosystem changes brought on by climate change.
Heffernan’s book arrives at an apposite time – the year before it was published, governments agreed a treaty on conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, called the BBNJ or High Seas Treaty. Although it needs to be ratified by many more countries before it comes into force, Heffernan calls the deal “a major win for conservation”. But she notes that while she hoped to produce an uplifting vision of the future to end her book, pessimism set in. In the end, she returns to the shoreline with a plea to not see the high seas as an “other”, but as a place connected to more familiar territories closer to home, and to us.
– Daniel Cressey
Mapping the Deep – Dawn Wright
This inspiring read follows the first Black person to go to the deepest place on Earth, the Challenger Deep trench in the western Pacific Ocean. Its hero is the oceanographer Dawn Wright, chief scientist at geographic information company Esri (formerly the Environmental Systems Research Institute). She made the voyage in 2022 with her compatriot, financier-turned-explorer Victor Vescovo.
The book charts Wright’s personal journey from a childhood spent living next to the beach in Maui, to a career mapping the ocean floor. Like a winding conversation with a group of people who love the subject of deep-sea exploration, it then widens out to touch upon oceanography’s women trailblazers, the current deep-sea mining debate, the history of humans in submersibles, Earth’s deepest shipwrecks and lots more.
In recent years – particularly since the Black Lives Matter movement wrestled its way into mainstream consciousness in 2020 – the climate action movement has been at pains to map out its symbiosis with ongoing struggles for equality around the world. But that is not an easy relationship to distil into a catchy placard or a pithy media soundbite. Mapping the Deep takes the time to present Wright’s very specific example and carefully lay it all out for the reader.
It also contains insightful quotes from many others, including the first person to complete both a spacewalk and a trip to Challenger Deep, Kathy Sullivan (the “most vertical person in the world”), and the film director and ocean enthusiast, James Cameron. This cast of extras reflects Wright’s repeated assertion that having a supportive community of family, friends and colleagues enabled her achievements.
Written lucidly and accompanied by an engaging collection of photographs, diagrams, explanatory asides and illuminating personal anecdotes, Mapping the Deep is perfect for anybody with a thirst for exploration – especially young adults looking for inspiring role models.
– Neil Simpson
Sea Level – Wilko Graf von Hardenberg
The ocean is rising, and faster now than ever before. The rate of “global mean sea level” rise is up from 1.4mm per year for most of the 1900s to over 3mm annually since the turn of the millennium, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. By the end of the century, the level could be over half a metre higher than at the end of the 1900s, even if the greenhouse gas emissions that are melting glaciers and sea ice, and expanding the ocean by making it warmer, are largely curtailed. But what do such measurements actually mean, when the difference between high and low tide can reach over 10 metres in some extreme locations?
Historian Wilko Graf von Hardenberg examines how “sea level” is a baseline that’s often taken as a certainty when it is actually “far from a natural index – a product of technically and culturally determined assumptions”. From examining how it was produced, he goes on to chart how sea level was then re-imagined as an exemplar of change brought about by anthropogenic warming.
The “global mean sea level” familiar from climate change warnings turns out to actually be just one possible way of looking at the height of the ocean – just as the Greenwich meridian is only one possible baseline for longitude.
Von Hardenberg notes that between his first thoughts on this book in 2011 and its completion in 2022, global sea levels rose by 5cm. They are not done rising yet, and this book offers a fine explanation of why these apparently small and certain measurements are worth thinking more carefully about.
– Daniel Cressey
Tracks on the Ocean – Sara Caputo
Lines on maps have real power to influence the world, defining claims of ownership and entitlement. In Tracks on the Ocean, maritime historian Sara Caputo looks at the inky threads made on sea charts to showcase examples of navigational prowess, or sometimes, how they inadvertently record a lack thereof. Caputo reveals that, while there has been a long history of outlining routes, tracing individual journeys via such lines appears to have only started in the 16th century. The revolutionary idea that a journey is noteworthy enough to leave a permanent mark, too, has a “fundamentally watery” origin, she notes.
“It is also inextricable from the development of European sea-bound empires,” she writes, as she retraces the traces of voyages; some famous, some fictional, some largely forgotten. These lines are for gathering knowledge, but also for making claims: “a storytelling tool”, she observes. Caputo’s approach is scholarly and occasionally more academic than a beach read, with philosophy and historiography on full display. But through this, she makes the creation of ocean tracks come to life.
Crucially, Caputo acknowledges that most of the tracks she applies her gaze to represent the workings of powerful, white men acting out colonialism and environmental conquests. This raises the question of who has not left such traces, or not been allowed to leave them.
Caputo’s book notes some of their stories: the lowly sailors on epic voyages, who did the hard work. Women like Mina Benson Hubbard, who journeyed into Labrador by canoe, accompanied by four (unnamed) Indigenous men, and had her exploration characterised in media reports at the time as a sentimental jaunt. And, of course, all those Indigenous people who made vast ocean journeys long before captains of famous European ships, but perhaps preferred to record them in chants rather than on charts. As humanity seeks increasingly to delineate the oceans, both for exploitation and for protection, it is well worth considering the origins of how lines on maps are made, and why.
– Daniel Cressey
