In Oceans Deep: Courage, Innovation, and Adventure Beneath the Waves

by Bill Streever

Overview

In this masterful account in the spirit of Bill Bryson and Ian Frazier, a longtime deep-sea diver masterfully weaves together the science and history of Earth's last remaining frontier: the sea.



In an age of unprecedented exploration and innovation, our oceans remain largely unknown, and endlessly fascinating: full of mystery, danger, beauty, and inspiration. In Oceans Deep celebrates the daring pioneers who tested the limits of what the human body can endure under water: free divers able to reach 300 feet on a single breath; engineers and scientists who uncovered the secrets of decompression; teenagers who built their own diving gear from discarded boilers and garden hoses in the 1930s; saturation divers who lived under water for weeks at a time in the 1960s; and the trailblazing men who voluntarily breathed experimental gases at pressures sufficient to trigger insanity.


Tracing both the little-known history and exciting future of how we travel and study the depths, Streever's captivating journey includes seventeenth-century leather-hulled submarines, their nuclear-powered descendants, a workshop where luxury submersibles are built for billionaire clients, and robots capable of roving unsupervised between continents, revolutionizing access to the ocean.


In this far-flung trip to the wild, night-dark place of shipwrecks, trapped submariners, oil wells, innovative technologies, and people willing to risk their lives while challenging the deep, we discover all the adventures our seas have to offer — and why they are in such dire need of conservation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316551311
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	07/02/2019
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	534,669
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bill Streever is the bestselling and award-winning author of And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind, Cold, and Heat. As a biologist, he has worked on issues ranging from climate change to the restoration of Arctic tundra to underwater noise to the evolution of cave crayfish. With his wife and co-captain, he splits his time between Alaska and their cruising sailboat, currently in Central America.

Table of Contents

Disclaimer xiii

Preface 3

Chapter 1 Descent 7

Chapter 2 On a Breath 38

Chapter 3 Under Pressure 72

Chapter 4 Saturated 110

Chapter 5 Submerged 151

Chapter 6 The Robots 191

Chapter 7 An Ocean in Need 229

Epilogue 261

Acknowledgments 265

Notes 267

Index 289

Editorial Reviews

05/27/2019

Diver and biologist Streever (Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places) fascinatingly recounts humanity’s expeditions beneath the sea in this informative and personal chronicle. With a real knack for storytelling, Streever evocatively puts the reader in the helmets, flippers, and submersibles of sea explorers throughout history. He grippingly recounts the daring, seven-mile journey of Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard aboard their “ungainly submersible” Trieste to the deepest part of the ocean, the Challenger Deep, in 1960; only filmmaker James Cameron has returned to that point, meaning nine more people have gone to the moon than have visited the darkest depths of the ocean. Streever then examines the free diving of 19th-century Greek sponge collectors; the air pressure experiments of 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle; the advent of diving helmets, decompression chambers, and scuba gear; and the evolution of submarines, from the Revolutionary War–era Turtle, to the diesel-powered submarines of both World Wars, to today’s nuclear-powered behemoths. Streever also shares accounts of his time as an oil field diver and his current dabbling with free diving and operating undersea robots. Writing at the behest of his late father, “my first diving partner,” and concluding with a look at how diving contributes to ocean conservation, Streever crafts a book to be enjoyed by divers and general readers alike. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A broad-spectrum examination of underwater adventuring...Mr. Streever's writing is lucid on subjects ranging from gas chemistry to dredging to underwater robotics."—Wall Street Journal


"A fascinating...journey for readers into a little-known world."—Anchorage Daily News


"A fine writer with genuine sea credentials...Streever's book makes clear that the deep, though much closer to us, is still tantalizingly distant."—Natural History Magazine


"In this homage-cum-history of human endeavor in the ocean depths, biologist, writer and diver Bill Streever brings to light a region less explored than the Moon."—Nature Magazine


"With a real knack for storytelling, Streever evocatively puts the reader in the helmets, flippers,
and submersibles of sea explorers throughout history...Streever crafts a book to be enjoyed by divers and general readers alike."—Publishers Weekly

"Ultimately, this timely and richly told story became something the author did not intend: an invaluable survey of how much damage has

been done and how much we will lose if we don't protect the seas."—Booklist


"A
buoyant, at times thrilling, account of the deep sea experience, perfect for divers and other lovers of life beneath the waves."—Kirkus Review


"Streever tells a story that captures human fascination with the ocean, and encourages readers to become more interested in what lies beneath the waves."—Shelf Awareness


Bill Streever has written a gripping and important book about the sea,
its science, and the technologies we've invented to begin to experience it, but also about our own humanity-and our future. I loved following him on this extraordinary deep dive into the largest and still most mysterious realm of this incredible planet we all share—JuliBerwald, author of Spineless

In Oceans Deep combines painstaking research with narrative flair and a genuine love for the subject...It is both an education and a terrific read—ChrisWright journalist and author of No MoreWorlds to Conquer


A
beautifully written and thrilling exploration of humanity's place in the depths by a master interpreter who has spent a lifetime face-to-face with the shipwrecks, animals, machines, daring souls, and enduring mysteries that populate this gorgeous, hidden world."—RobertKurson, New York Times bestselling author of Shadow Divers and Rocket Men

Exquisitely researched and written, I highly recommend In Oceans Deep—Jonathan White, author of Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean


Bill
Streever takes us on an entertaining and richly informative journey into the marine frontier. I recommend this book to anyone who may wish to be awed, and perhaps disturbed, by the depths to which humans will go to explore it."—JonathanBalcombe, author of What a Fish Knows

From the Publisher

2019-04-28
The story of humanity's presence in the deep sea, as told by diver and research biologist Streever (And Soon I Heard a Roaring Wind: A Natural History of Moving Air, 2016, etc.).

"I wanted readers to embrace the part of our world that is shrouded by depth," writes the author at the beginning of this broad survey of "people underwater, about the challenges of getting there, being there, and returning to the surface." Writing in the conversational style that has marked his previous books, Streever begins with the 1960 descent of the Trieste submersible into the deepest of the ocean floors, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. It was a remarkable achievement, and the author rides the feat down—here is where scuba tanks implode, here is where the walls of a typical submarine would fail—to the bottom, where the pressure was measured at 16,883 pounds per square inch. This leads into a chapter on the all-consuming role of pressure on diving and its exertion not just on submersibles, but on the human body as well. The author, who lives aboard a cruising sailboat with his wife, offers a solid examination of the behavior of gases as one goes deeper under the waves. There is a smart chapter on breathing as the key to understanding diving, including exhale diving, apnea diving, and free diving. Regarding the last, during the ascent, the pressure in the lungs drops and oxygen in the tissues and blood flows back into the lungs, and the "diver may or may not notice the fading of consciousness." Although the author discusses the many joys of deep diving both in and out of submersibles, he also emphasizes the perils of going beyond your capabilities. These include everything from working for sustained periods in deep water and relying on exotic gas mixtures to prevent such events as nitrogen narcosis to the fortunes and follies of the first submarines.

A buoyant, at times thrilling, account of the deep sea experience, perfect for divers and other lovers of life beneath the waves.

Kirkus Reviews

07/01/2019

Streever (Cold) has intimate knowledge of working in the deep sea, as he was once employed as an oil field diver who assembled pipelines on the seabed. This imparted to him a love of the deep sea. In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh journeyed seven miles down in the Trieste to the Challenger Deep, the deepest oceanic point on earth. This story serves as the jumping-off point for Streever's examination of the different ways that humans have explored the deep sea: from free diving to SCUBA to travel via submersibles and submarines. Streever not only documents the different ways humans have voyaged in the deep sea but also traces the research that first documented the root causes for decompression sickness. Concluding with what he sees as the future of deep-sea exploration—autonomous underwater vehicles—this fascinating history takes a wide-angled approach to the myriad ways humans have interacted with the ocean. VERDICT A compelling history of humans' investigations of the deep sea written in an engaging manner, this book is destined to be another best seller for Streever.—Diana Hartle, Univ. of Georgia Science Lib., Athens

Library Journal

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