Why the Sea Does What It Does: A Curious Atlas of Currents, Waves, Ice, and Life Deep

The sea is salt. The rivers that fill it are not. That is the kind of question this book is built on. Why do waves always turn to face the beach, whatever the wind was doing when they were born? Why does ice float, and why does every living thing depend on that one oddity? Why is the deep ocean freezing even at the equator? And why does melting ice make the sea fall in some places instead of rise? Why the Sea Does What It Does takes twenty-four short chapters to explain the machinery of the ocean, plainly and without equations. Each chapter starts from something you have already seen, hands you the mechanism behind it, and finishes with a box of facts worth repeating. Inside you will find: - What a wave actually is, and why almost no water travels with it - The rip current that drowns swimmers, and the simple trick that beats it - Why Britain grows grass at the latitude of Labrador - How two warm degrees in the Pacific can empty a nation's fishing boats - Why a ring of coral marks a mountain that is no longer there - Life two kilometres down that runs on chemistry instead of sunlight - The half a million years when the Mediterranean was a desert three kilometres below sea level - Why there is no such thing as one sea level Every chapter carries its own hand drawn diagram, and the book closes with a twenty four question quiz to see how much of the ocean you have quietly come to understand. The second volume of The Curious Atlas, the series for readers who never stopped asking why. It reads perfectly well on its own, and sits beside Why the Sky Does What It Does, which does the same for everything above your head.