The Blue Planet

Livre correspondant à mes attentes en bon état.

DK Publishers have put out some stunning volumes recently, but they have especially outdone themselves with two: "Animal" and "The Blue Planet". Lavishly illustrated and gloriously photographed, "The Blue Planet" is a fascinating exploration of the 70% of our world that we don't live in. As one of the authors states, we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about our own oceans. "Blue Planet" tries to address the imbalance and, for the lay reader, succeeds admirably. The book is excellently organized and written in plain language comprehensible to almost any reader. It's divided into seven main parts: an overview of the ocean system, coastal shorelines, tropical seas, temperate seas, frozen seas, the open ocean, and the deep. Each part is divided into subsections with reference arrows to other relevant sections, making it easy to use for research. We learn a lot about the feeding, mating and survival patterns of the inhabitants of each layer of the ocean; most fascinating to this reviewer was the dazzling spectacle of the light shows caused by bioluminescence in fish that live so deep down that most of us will only see them on film. There's also a photograph of a dead giant squid, proving that archyteuthis is no figment of anyone's imagination; we wonder if anyone will ever glimpse a live one. The book is a companion volume to the excellent series on the Discovery Channel but it stands up very well on its own. It's a must-have for anyone interested in the infinite variety of life on this world.

I replaced mjy copy with this one. Some how my copy was water damaged.

This excellent book was published in 2001 to accompany the BBC series of the same name.The book explores the oceans from the seashore to the vast depths in 7 main chapters as follows 1)the water planet 2)life on the edge 3)tropical seas 4)temperate seas 5)frozen seas 6)the open ocean and 7)the deep.Each chapter is well written and researched but what really makes the book are the excellent pictures (not to many are spoiled by covering 2 pages).A book to be highly recommended but must bee seen to be fully appreciated.

Great book, it was on a recommended reading list for the Marine Zoology course I am doing and the local library did not have a copy (?).Covers every thing in such detail but still very readable, wall laid out with great diagrams and pictures to fully explain everything.All in all a great reference book that I think I can keep going back to again and again.