BiblioVault - Books about Ocean bottom

Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans

Tommy Koh

National University of Singapore Press, 2019

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS, has been called a constitution for the oceans. It keeps order in the world’s oceans and regulates nations’ use of their natural resources. Tommy Koh served as president of the third convention, a multi-year meeting that resulted in this important treaty for the government of the global commons. In Building a New Legal Order for the Oceans, Koh brings a unique, insider’s perspective on the UNCLOS negotiation process, and the concepts, tensions, and intentions that underlie today’s Law of the Sea.

In this book, Koh fully explains the many new concepts of international law that arose from UNCLOS III, such as the Exclusive Economic Zone, Archipelagic State, Straits Used for International Navigation, Transit Passage, Archipelagic Sealane Passage, and the Common Heritage of Mankind. He also discusses current threats to maritime security and explains the intricacies of the disputes in the South China Sea. Koh asks What can be learned from the success of UNCLOS? How can we build on that success and manage the new tensions that arise in the Law of the Sea? There is no better guide to this aspect of international law than Koh.

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Fathoming the Ocean

The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea

Helen M. Rozwadowski

Harvard University Press, 2008

By the middle of the nineteenth century, as scientists explored the frontiers of polar regions and the atmosphere, the ocean remained silent and inaccessible. The history of how this changed—of how the depths became a scientific passion and a cultural obsession, an engineering challenge and a political attraction—is the story that unfolds in Fathoming the Ocean.

In a history at once scientific and cultural, Helen Rozwadowski shows us how the Western imagination awoke to the ocean's possibilities—in maritime novels, in the popular hobby of marine biology, in the youthful sport of yachting, and in the laying of a trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The ocean emerged as important new territory, and scientific interests intersected with those of merchant-industrialists and politicians. Rozwadowski documents the popular crazes that coincided with these interests—from children's sailor suits to the home aquarium and the surge in ocean travel. She describes how, beginning in the 1860s, oceanography moved from yachts onto the decks of oceangoing vessels, and landlubber naturalists found themselves navigating the routines of a working ship's physical and social structures.

Fathoming the Ocean offers a rare and engaging look into our fascination with the deep sea and into the origins of oceanography—origins still visible in a science that focuses the efforts of physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, and engineers on the common enterprise of understanding a vast, three-dimensional, alien space.

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The Great Basin Seafloor

Exploring the Ancient Oceans of the Desert West

Frank DeCourten

University of Utah Press, 2022

Many people appreciate the stunning vistas of the Great Basin desert; understanding the region’s geological past can provide a deeper way to know and admire this landscape. In The Great Basin Seafloor, Frank DeCourten immerses readers in a time when the Basin was covered by a vast ocean in which volcanoes exploded and sea life flourished.

Written for a nontechnical audience, this book interprets the rock record left by more than 500 million years of oceanic activity, when mud and sand accumulated and solidified to produce today’s Great Basin across parts of modern Utah, Nevada, and California. DeCourten deciphers clues within exposed slopes and canyons to reconstruct the vanished seafloor and its volcanic events and examines fossils to reveal once-thriving ancient marine communities. Supplemental material is available online to serve as a field guide for readers wishing to explore this ancient ocean themselves as they travel through the region.

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Upheaval from the Abyss

Ocean Floor Mapping and the Earth Science Revolution

Lawrence, David M.

Rutgers University Press, 2002

The deep oceans are the last great frontier remaining on Earth. Humans have conquered the vast wilderness of the terrestrial surface, from the searing deserts and dark forests of the tropics to the icy polar regions. Today, anyone with enough ambition and money can travel upriver into the heart of the Borneo jungle, climb Mount Everest, or spend the night at the South Pole. But the oceans beyond the continental shelves remain forbidding, beyond the reach of science, adventurism, and commerce.

Not long ago, scientists viewed the ocean floor as a vast, featureless plain, an ancient repository of detritus eroded from the surface of an unchanging Earth. Light never reached the seemingly lifeless depths. The ocean basins were only of marginal scholarly interest. This all changed with the Herculean quest to discover what lay on the world's ocean floor—a quest that inspired the continental drift-plate tectonics revolution and overturned prevailing scientific notions of how the Earth’s surface was created, rearranged, and destroyed.

Upheaval from the Abyss spans a 130-year period, beginning with the early, backbreaking efforts to map the depths during the age of sail; continuing with improvements in research methods spurred by maritime disaster and war; and culminating in the publication of the first map of the world’s ocean floor in 1977. The author brings this tale to life by weaving through it the personalities of the scientists-explorers who struggled to see the face of the deep, and reveals not only the facts of how the ocean floor was mapped, but also the human dimensions of what the scientists experienced and felt while in the process.

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