A vivid, up-to-date tour of the Earth's last frontier, a remote and mysterious realm that nonetheless lies close to the heart of even the most land-locked reader. The sea covers seven-tenths of the Earth, but we have mapped only a small percentage of it. The sea contains millions of species of animals and plants, but we have identified only a few thousand of them. The sea controls our planet's climate, but we do not really understand how. The sea is still the frontier, and yet it seems so familiar that we sometimes forget how little we know about it. Just as we are poised on the verge of exploiting the sea on an unprecedented scale-mining it, fertilizing it, fishing it out-this book reminds us of how much we have yet to learn. More than that, it chronicles the knowledge explosion that has transformed our view of the sea in just the past few decades, and made it a far more interesting and accessible place. From the Big Bang to that far-off future time, two billion years from now, when our planet will be a waterless rock; from the lush crowds of life at seafloor hot springs to the invisible, jewel-like plants that float at the sea surface; from the restless shifting of the tectonic plates to the majestic sweep of the ocean currents, Kunzig's clear and lyrical prose transports us to the ends of the Earth.

The product of a unique collaboration between a pioneering earth scientist and an award-winning science writer, "Fixing Climate "takes an unconventional approach to the problem of global warming--and offers a possible solution. Hailed by his colleagues as "one of the our greatest living geoscientists," Wallace S. Broecker, a longtime researcher at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, warned about the possible consequences of global warming decades before it became a compelling public issue. Hooked on climate studies since his student days, he has learned, largely through his own findings, that climate does change--naturally, dramatically, and rarely benignly. He also knows from experience that when mankind pushes nature as we are currently doing by dumping some sixty to seventy million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day, climate will change even more dramatically and less benignly. As Broecker points out, if a well-meaning fairy godmother were to turn us all into energy-saving paragons at the stroke of midnight tonight, the resulting reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide might lessen but could not turn aside the great warming tide now headed our way. There is, nonetheless, a glimmer of hope in the development of new technologies that are directed not only at the reduction of carbon dioxide output but also at its harmless disposal.