David Bowers dives beneath the surface of our home waters to find out how the sea works
Review by by Elizabeth Wainwright
I live in the middle of Devon between two seas – the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean – and grew up on the coast. I feel a sense of home when I smell sea air. This draw of the sea drew me to the book Home Waters by David Bowers, professor emeritus of oceanography at Bangor University in Wales. I wanted
to understand more about the waters that define my, and our, home.
The focus of the book is the continental shelves or ‘shelf seas’ – the shallower seas around continents, and specifically the shelf seas around the British Isles. Being an island nation has defined Britain – its land, history and engagement with the world – for thousands of years. We experience some of the highest tides on the planet and get battered by Atlantic waves. The seas that surround us have been saviour (they stopped the Nazi advance during the Second World War) and disaster (catastrophic flooding led to the development of the Thames tidal barrier).
Bowers looks beyond the beach to what lies beneath the surface of the sea and how it works. He focuses on the physics of oceanography – tidal ranges and bores, currents, water colour – but draws on biology, chemistry, geology and maritime history too. This is a book written for the general reader, however – scientific explanations, often accompanied by diagrams and illustrations, are clear and insightful, and I imagine especially relevant to those who venture out on or into the water.
The intertwining of oceanography and history that Bowers explores is fascinating. ‘In the 1940s, there was a renaissance in interest in the way that ocean waves behave… troops and equipment were being landed on beaches and the success of the operation could well depend on the sea conditions at the time,’ Bowers writes. Scientists were tasked with wave forecasting for the D-Day landings and new tools and methods were built from scratch that detected waves arriving from storms as far away as the tip of South America. ‘As with so many things, the demands of war had provoked great advances in knowledge.’
The sea will always hold its secrets, but Home Waters makes them a bit more accessible.
