The California Current: A Pacific Ecosystem and Its Fliers, Divers, and Swimmers

This book is both informative and concerning. Beginning with the planetary forces that shape water behavior in the Pacific Ocean, we learn that not all currents are equal. The piling of water mid-pacific and the way the fluid dynamics rotate about that liquid mountain is a mental model that was new to me. And I suspect will be similarly fascinating to others. I’ve spent most of my life on the California coast, diving in its waters, and on other pacific shores from the South Pacific to Asia. I had not the least idea of the complexity of the physics and biology involved in that massive set of phenomena and biota. Being borne on the swirling and seasonal changes of the slow flow down California’s coast, does not preclude ocean-spanning discussion.

I am mentally richer for Stan Ulanski’s work. He covers sea turtles and our historic interactions with them, seabirds, pinnipeds ranging from walrus to sea lions, sea otters, all the wealth of the seas. And he tells of exploitation, of near extinctions, of the collapses of great fisheries. Acidification of ocean waters upwelling now, from perhaps fifty years past, is alarming. Buy and read this book for education and to alert yourself.