Table Of ContentOUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi
Ocean WOrlds
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi
Ocean
WOrlds
The story of seas on Earth
and other planets
jan zalasiewicz
and mark williams
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
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© Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams 2014
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First Edition published in 2014
Impression: 1
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To Asih, Kasia, Mateusz, Milana
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Preface
As we walk and drive through our wide landscapes, it can be hard to
remember that most of the Earth’s surface is taken up by another world.
It is a liquid world, kilometres deep, within which we cannot breathe,
although many other organisms can. For most of our history it was,
except for its surface and shallowest reaches, inaccessible and invisible:
the distant stars seemed within closer reach. One could imagine—and
people did—monsters as fabulous as the mighty kraken, and ancient
submerged civilizations in those deeps.
It is about a century and a half since humans began to seriously
explore its depths. In the last few decades it has become clear that our
own oceanic world can at times surpass fiction and fable—and only in
the last few years has it become clear that, in the distant reaches of
outer space, there are many other ocean worlds of astonishing variety.
Then there is the impact of the Earth’s oceans on our own land-based
lives, which is seen to be ever greater the more it is examined—
although for some time we have known that the oceans are the source
of life-giving rains, and of fish for our dinner plates too.
This book is an attempt to give some picture of the workings of
ocean worlds—our own, obviously—and others too, through time
and across space. We are geologists and palaeontologists, and are
acutely aware that the strata that we measure and the fossils that we
glean from them largely represent petrified relics from the Earth’s
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi
Preface
ancient oceans. Being geologists too (and not astronomers, or phys-
icists, or oceanographers) we are acutely aware that we have had to
venture far from our familiar territory in order to make this canvas as
wide as we wish it to be.
Hence, we are grateful to many people for helping to produce this
narrative. Latha Menon, as ever, has been a skilled and supportive editor,
while her colleagues at Oxford University Press, notably Emma Ma,
have helped keep this whole project on track. John Bridges and Euan
Nisbet have provided splendidly thoughtful and useful reviews. We are
grateful to images supplied by Ryszard Kryza, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg,
Julian Whimpenny, Derek Siveter, Ron Blakey, David Siveter, Jean
Vannier, John Bridges, Jon Sykes, Hou Xianguang, Nick Butterfield,
Thijs Vandenbroucke, and Latha Menon. We thank Lewis Dartnell,
too, for stimulating discussion, Jon Sykes for talking us through the
various spacecraft used to image deep space, and our many colleagues
down the years, from whom we have learnt pretty much everything
that we know: Adrian Rushton and the late Dick Aldridge, in particu-
lar, have provided constant inspiration. Our families deserve special
thanks, as always, for putting up with the many hours sacrificed to
this endeavour.
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contents
List of Illustrations x
List of Plates xii
1 Water in the Cosmos 1
2 Ocean Origins on Earth 16
3 Ocean Forms 38
4 The Salt of the Earth 65
5 Moving the Waters 89
6 Life of the Oceans 123
7 Oceans in Crisis 163
8 The End of Earthly Oceans 193
9 Oceans of the Solar System 213
10 Undreamed Shores 244
Notes 266
References and Further Reading 275
Index 287
