Books: Profile in Water

THE SEA AROUND Us (230 pp.)—Rachel Carson—Oxford University ($3.50).

About 2½ billion years ago, a ball of whirling gases, intensely hot and rushing through the black spaces of the universe at immense speed, gradually became the earth. At one point, a great chunk of earthly substance was torn away—and the earth had a moon. The atmosphere developed, then came countless years of rain, filling in great gaps on the earth’s surface. Thus the oceans were born.

This is the story with which Rachel Carson opens her book about the sea. Like a television camera rolling through a museum of rare objects, The Sea Around Us focuses on almost everything connected with the world’s oceans: their origins, history, inhabitants and mysteries. Miss Carson, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writes lucidly and has a gift for popularizing without talking down to her readers.

A typical chapter is Miss Carson’s biography of the surface waters. Here is the snake-mackerel, up from the depths, first seen in living form by the Kon-Tiki expedition; here the uncountable creatures called plankton, a community of minute animals and plants. In the ocean food cycle, plankton is eaten by such small fish as the herring, small fish by larger ones like the tuna, larger ones by squids, and all of these by whales. To survive, sea creatures assume remarkable disguises: the Sargasso Sea slug has a soft, shapeless body, exactly like the vegetation in which it lives; another fish mimics weeds even to the point of having white dots which look like worm spots.

Under its sometimes placid surface, the sea is shown to be a swirling and endless battleground: 70-ton sperm whales pitted against squids 30 feet long, fur seals preying on species of fish no man has ever seen alive. And in the midst of this bloody, ceaseless struggle, some pacifists survive a long time: in the calm Sargasso Sea, plants last for centuries.

With Dantesque confidence, Miss Carson moves down into the sunless depths of the sea, describes the bottom sediment (in some places 10,000 feet deep), sketches the contours of the submarine mountain ranges, and speculates on the changes in sea shape. As she tells her story with scientific assurance and a happy freedom from scientific jargon, curious bits of information emerge:

¶I Half the fish living in dark waters have, in some mysterious way, developed the power of luminescence, and many of them carry luminous torches that can be turned on or off at will.

¶There are eerie regions of sediment which, for reasons that remain unknown, are carpeted with a soft, red substance devoid of any organic remains but sharks’ teeth and the ear bones of whales.

¶The Gulf Stream is a recent development—a mere 60 million years old.

¶Birds on inaccessible islands are tame and friendly: albatrosses have been known to bow politely to human visitors,

¶In a cubic mile of sea water there is about $93 million worth of gold, but no one has yet figured out how to extract it profitably.