Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets PDF
Preview Ocean Worlds: The story of seas on Earth and other planets
OUP 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 3 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams 2014 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2014 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940437 ISBN 978–0–19–967288–2 Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi To Asih, Kasia, Mateusz, Milana OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi 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. viii OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 08/07/2014, SPi 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
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