| To Follow the Water: Exploring the Ocean to Discover Climate | 
 enlarge | Author: Dallas Murphy
Publisher: Basic Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (12 reviews)
Sales Rank: 418298
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 296
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9
ISBN: 0465005101
Dewey Decimal Number: 551
EAN: 9780465005109
ASIN: 0465005101
Publication Date: June 23, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In To Follow the Water, critically acclaimed author Dallas Murphy artfully recasts the story of human expansion and cultural development with the ocean playing the central role. Applying a novelist?s eye for detail and a historian?s drive for perspective, he connects the great ages of ocean exploration from Columbus, Magellan, and Cook to the development of modern oceanography. Letting scientists speak for themselves at sea and ashore, Murphy learns that oceanographers are not only observing and explaining the ocean?s dynamic, global circulation, but also employing their skills, tools, and techniques to understand and predict climate change. To Follow the Water is an enlightening and entertaining voyage of discovery spanning the evolution of our relationship to the ocean, first as an impediment to human ambition, then as the pathway for Western expansion, and now, most important, as a subject of scientific study with immediate relevance to our future.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Great Book August 24, 2008
Dallas wrote a brilliant book on sailing near and around Cape Horn. It is in the same vein that this book arrives. Always interesting, always informed, he writes authoritatively on his subject, his love, the oceans, and the currents therein. All life has come from the oceans, and when they die, we will die. Part history, part scientific text book, Murph's book is highly recommended.
 Follow The Landlubber June 28, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
To Follow The Water: Exploring The Oceans To Discover Climate
by Dallas Murphy
June 29, 2008
Mr Murphy is a novelist, playwright and journalist. He participated in a couple of cruises aboard an oceanographic research vessel and writes here about physical oceanography. Unfortunately, his ability to educate is limited by his lack of knowledge about the subject. As he says, "I don't do math." This has led to a large number of errors in his text, which one has some trouble at times untangling in the first place. Here are some I wrote down:
PP51 -- "...[G]yre refers to a circle in either form or motion." Either form? There is only one form for a circle. The reader is misled by his syntax. It would be better to write "...[G]yre refers to a circle either in form or motion." This more clearly separates the subordinate clause.
pp61 -- After just saying that the Earth is warmed by the sun and reradiates the heat back upward, he goes on in the next sentence to say that the outgoing longwave radiation is made up of REFLECTED rays and thus the greenhouse effect. These are not reflected rays, what is he talking about? They are as he just said, EMITTED by the surface.
pp62 -- "When the Sun heats a portion of the Earth's surface, hot air rises, leaving behind a region of low pressure...drawing in cooler air from wherever it's available." WRONG. If this were true the pressure would be high not low: if the warmed air rose and new air came in beneath it, there would be more air in the column than previously and thus the pressure would be higher. Yes the warm air tries to rise but it is restrained by the full weight of the atmosphere above it; there is no uprush of warm air at the center of a low pressure system. The way to reduce the pressure is to drive air out of the column and this is sideways motion, not vertical motion. Warming aloft reduces the surface pressure and the reduced pressure starts the air circulating in the horizontal. What he is talking about operates on the cloud-scale, not the synoptic- or even the meso-scale. Like this: A bubble air is warmed, expands and rises; entrainment draws in environmental air beneath it. There is no change in surface pressure beneath a cumulus cloud.
pp65 -- The diagram showing the Earth's wind systems is ridiculous. He has the equator going through Palm Beach! The Amazon is at 65S! LOL! There are plenty of good diagrams of the trade winds etc. out there. Were the reviewers sleeping here?
pp67 -- Explaining how wind creates waves, he correctly identifies the three factors of speed duration and fetch. Then he says, "...if its duration is nearly constant, then the wind doesn't need to blow all that hard to drag large quantities of water along with it." HUH? Duration is "constant"? Duration is a time interval. How can that be constant? What he means is that if the interval is sufficiently long, then for a given speed and fetch it will raise a fully-developed sea. But he is misusing the concept because his subject here is mass transport, not wave development. Waves transport energy not mass. Fetch and duration do not affect surface shearing stress which is what initiates transport and is totally dependant on velocity.
pp70 -- Speaking of the currents in the Arctic Ocean, he tells of us Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian, who (says Murphy) surmised that "...drift objects...from Siberia turning up in Scandinavian waters suggested the existence of an east-setting current." No way. If the current went from west to east then objects from Siberia would go the other way, toward Alaska, right? In fact the current sets from east to west. The reviewers missed another howler.
pp76 -- He has water from the Gulf Stream turning right and piling up in the central Atlantic, which it does. Then he has the water flowing away from this bulge turning right and completing the surface circulation of the basin, which it also does. But as a reader I had the vision of surface water flowing in two directions at the same time, in and out. Ekman's spiral does indeed create a NET transport at right angles to the wind stress but this refers to the movement through the entire column. In other words, it is not surface waters piling up in the central Atlantic. This is how the surface waters are enabled to drain off the elevated surface without encountering the other water trying to get in. See? He has neglected depth in his exposition on Ekman pumping.
pp98 -- Here he talks of the Gulf Stream shedding eddies and follows one into the Sargasso Sea. Then he has it moving "eastward" toward Cape Hatteras. Say wha? He has trouble with the east-west thing I guess. Another faux pas.
pp99 -- "...cold water is richer than warm because it naturally contains more nutrients." Not exactly. It contains more dissolved oxygen because of the dependance of solubility on temperature. It is this that supports the food chain. There is plenty of very cold water that supports very little life because it has few nutrients. Availability of nutrients has more to do with proximity to a food source than temperature. He gets this generally but misstates it here as having to do with temperature.
pp99 -- He has phytoplankton feeding by photosynthesis and forming the base of the food chain "...on which the other kind of plankton, the animal version, PHYTOPLANKTON, feed." He means zooplankton. In the very next sentence he tightens the screws: "Some are herbivores, grazers on zooplankton..." Dude, can't you get it right? Phytoplankton are plant-like. Zooplankton are animal-like and graze on the phytoplankton. The reviewers were fast asleep again.
pp189 -- "Rita had indeed matured into a category 3 hurricane and was heading...right for us." This is mendacious, apparently used for dramatic effect. They were on a vessel in the Atlantic east of the Bahamas in Sept 2005. Rita formed near the east end of Cuba and moved west through the Straits of Florida paralleling the north Cuban coast as a Tropical Storm. It only intensified into a Cat 3 when it entered the Gulf of Mexico and turned past Dry Tortugas toward Houston. It was about 20 miles south of me here in Key West at one point. Had it been a Cat 3 at that time it would have been horrendous for us. Did he think no one would notice his untruth? Or did he think he was in the Gulf?
pp190 -- "...tropical-storm conditions would brush our position...[and] by dark we were experiencing 30-knot winds..." Tropical-storm force winds are 35 knots or greater. In other words he did not experience tropical-storm force winds. Again he is intentionally misleading the reader for dramatic effect.
Oh well. You get the idea. This is what happens when journalists write about science. Since they "don't do math" they cannot comprehend physics so how can they hope to educate the rest of us by writing books? They cannot. Therefore the purpose of the book is not to educate, but something else. This is why "To Follow The Water" is only tangentially about oceanography. It is really about the fun adventures Mr Murphy had while on a couple of oceanographic cruises, plus a brief message about climte change. Fine, in that case we can do without the editing that was lacking. But this is filed in 551.5246 in the Dewey decimal system, and that is the science shelf. I feel like writing the publisher.
 A MarineBio "must-have" for every ocean lover's library! April 29, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book describes is not only entertaining to read, it makes the role of the ocean in regulating climate easily understandable to the lay person. This topic has been largely ignored in the climate change discussions, but the ocean's contribution to climate regulation is a critical factor. Dallas Murphy entertains us by describing this role from a historical perspective by tracing the discovery of ocean dynamics by oceanographers. Then, Murphy moves into the modern day by bringing the reader aboard three oceanographic expeditions to further educate us on the relationship between the ocean and climate. Again, for what could have been a very dry (pardon the pun) topic - this book is a fast-paced and enjoyable read. A MarineBio "must-have" for every ocean lover's library.
Engaging History of European Discovery of Ocean Currents February 14, 2008
I don't usually read books like this, so it's significant that Murphy engaged my mind the whole way through.
The history of man's discovery and use of the currents I found particularly interesting. Murphy writes about the Atlantic and Europeans, for the most part, and tells us, for example, why merchant sailing ships made faster passage than British government ships to and from the colonies. (My dad had me read Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative (Dover Maritime Books), a personal and historical account of sailing in the Atlantic and Pacific. It's a book that stays in my mind.) Murphy continues this history into the present.
Of significance to us today is, again for example, Murphy's explanation of the rumor, I guess you might say, that the Gulf Stream/North Atlantic/Norwegian Current is diminishing with global warming. Murphy explains what the scientists meant when they talked about this current and how the journalists simplified and sensationalized what they said. (I had been concerned that our people in Britain and Northern Europe would freeze with the weakening of this current, but Murphy explains that it's not so simple.)
My dad, I think, would really like this book.
A thought-provoking study of climate and oceans January 3, 2008
In To Follow the Water, sailor and science writer Murphy describes the complex interplay between the Gulf Stream and other ocean currents and Earth's climate. Along the way, he spins a great yarn while giving us the history and theory of oceanography and introducing us to the scientists who study the oceans. The author takes complex science and scientific theories and makes them understandable. This is not, however, a dumbed-down version of the science. Murphy understands the ocean from a sailor's viewpoint and uses that knowledge to the fullest. He also makes good use of examples to reinforce explanations and concepts. Who knew, for example, that a billion cubic feet of sea water passes by Palm Beach every second and that the flow increases dramatically just north of that point. This is the second important and fascinating book that Murphy has written about the oceans--the first was Rounding the Horn--and I hope he continues to publish on a topic that he knows and loves so well.
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