Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World

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Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told - that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture.

The blue of Earth is a gigantic engine, a dynamic liquid powerhouse that stretches around our planet and is connected to every part of our lives. It has components on every scale, from the mighty Gulf Stream gliding across the Atlantic to the tiny bubbles bursting at the top of a breaking wave. This is a beautiful, elegant, tightly woven system, full of surprising connections and profound consequences. All of the Earth's ocean, from the equator to the poles, is a single engine powered by sunlight - a blue machine.The world needs a 'David Attenborough for physics' and Helen Czerski is a prime contender - she's brilliant, clear, passionate, modern and inspiring. Emma Freud, BBC Radio 4 Loose Ends

But when explaining the physics of light, waves, bubbles, salinity, water density, temperature, the tiniest molecule and the broadest ocean, Czerski may well be peerless. In the scientific sections, Blue Machine is a dazzle of stories beautifully told. Take this description of sunlight transformed by Earth: Timely, elegant and passionately argued, Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. The understanding it offers is crucial to our future. Drawing on years of experience at the forefront of marine science, Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of Earth's defining feature, showing us the thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine.

Reader Reviews

Helen Czerski's fascinating new book casts the ocean as an extraordinary giant engine, and helps us grasp its complex physics and its key role in climate change"

Earth is home to a huge story that is rarely told - that of our ocean. Not the fish or the dolphins, but the massive ocean engine itself: what it does, why it works, and the many ways it has influenced animals, weather and human history & culture. This is the spectacular story of Earth's dynamic ocean. A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.For serious sea enthusiasts or budding marine biologists then this book will be the perfect addition to your shelf. For me, it just didn't hit the spot that I was hoping for. One thing is clear, this woman loves the ocean and anything and everything associated with it. The book is less of a novel than it is an outpouring of a life's research encompassing everything from the water cycle, to a history of trade routes, whale excrement, ocean food webs, the life of scientists working at the poles, deep ocean biology, plastic contamination, whale earwax, the transition from sailing to the steam-engine, and yes, more whale poop. It was very interesting, yet was also all over the place. Some of the writing is beautifully descriptive and gave me an appreciation of the writers experiences and my own experiences with the sea. However, many sections of the book were very science heavy and I felt more like I was reading an academic paper or thesis and I didn't enjoy these sections as much. Most of the non-fiction I read is history but I do like to make an occasional foray into science. I’ve come across Helen Czerski as a broadcaster but not as a writer. My mistake – her writing is immediately engaging and good enough that Blue Machine would be an interesting read if it were only, as she puts it, ‘a voyage through the global ocean’. What lifts it further is the depth (sorry) achieved by mixing her own experiences into the narrative, from Arctic research trips to canoeing in the Pacific. Placing her live science research alongside a very wide-ranging portrait of the oceans makes for a great read. This isn’t a book dumbed down for the general reader: Czerski doesn’t avoid complicated concepts but conveys them using straightforward language; we all need a science teacher like Helen. Through stories of history, culture, and animals, she explains how water temperature, salinity, gravity, and the movement of Earth's tectonic plates all interact in a complex dance, supporting life at the smallest scale—plankton—and the largest—giant sea turtles, whales, humankind. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves, to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she introduces the messengers, passengers, and voyagers that rely on interlinked systems of vast currents, invisible ocean walls, and underwater waterfalls.