Ocean’s Ten
Lennoxville Library
Simon Winchester is a geologist by training, so it is not surprising that most of his books are about the physical world. He was plying his trade as a geologist in Uganda when he was moved by James Morris’s Coronation Everest, an account of Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mt. Everest, to want to become a writer. He wrote to Morris for advice and was told to get out of the mines and start writing. So he became a newspaper reporter, spending the largest part of his career in the employ of the Manchester Guardian.
Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World’s Superpowers (2015), in spite of what the title might suggest, is not a history of the Pacific Ocean. Rather, in this work Winchester delves into ten topics that have had their origins or their greatest impact in or around the planet’s largest body of water since 1950. For example, in a chapter titled On Carbon (which has nothing to do with global-warming), he argues that we should make 1950 the zero year for setting calendars. That was the year when, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons, there was sufficient extra radiation in the atmosphere to render carbon dating of objects in the future much more difficult than it had been before.
As one can glean from the title, Winchester has chosen a rather eclectic selection of subjects: some deal with only the physical features of earth, sea, and sky; others focus on the interaction between the physical world and the humans who inhabit it; and others deal almost exclusively with the interaction of humans with each other. It is evident that to a large degree Winchester is cribbing from himself. He has published some 25 books, several of which overlap with the material he presents in Pacific.
Not surprisingly, Winchester is at his best when he is dealing with the physical world. He typically begins with a very strong hook to set up a deeper analysis. For example, he starts with the voyages of the submersible Alvin to lead into a discussion of the discovery of hot water vents on the floor of the oceans and the ridge lines in the middle of the oceans. Similarly he uses the super cyclone Tracy, which hammered Darwin, Australia in 1974, as a lead-in to an examination of the effect of El Ninos not just on the Pacific, but also on global weather patterns. The parts on the interactions between people, such as the potential conflict between China and its neighbours around the South China Sea, tend to be the weakest because much of this material is speculation on Winchester’s part.
There is a great deal to be learned from this book. Winchester gives very clear explanations of the impact of nuclear weapons testing not just on the atmosphere, but on the lives of Pacific islanders who were displaced to protect them from the blasts and who remain displaced 70 years later. The description of the Ring of Fire is also very well done. Winchester emphasizes that the whole idea of tectonic plates sliding over or beside each other is a very recent concept. We tend to think of this idea as being old hat, but it was developed only in the 60s and not generally accepted for a couple of decades after that. Like DNA testing, which most of us now regard as routine, tectonic plates and shifts are an innovation in science that occurred during the lifetimes of most of the present population.
Not only is Winchester’s writing very solid, but the maps and illustrations he uses are a big help in elucidating his stories. The garbage islands in the Pacific, composed mostly of floating plastic and other synthetic materials, occur where they do for well-defined reasons. The maps show how winds and currents combine to push all this man-made debris, most of which is discarded close to coastlines, into the positions they occupy in the middle of the ocean.
If I have a gripe about this book, it is with the actual printing. The font, specifically with regards to punctuation, occasions frequent misreading. The semi-colons are printed with the period slightly to the left of the comma underneath. As a result, one tends to read the semicolons as commas. This causes the rest of the sentence not to make any sense, so the reader has to keep backtracking to get reoriented.
Winchester has been nominated for many awards for his writing and was named an officer of the Order of the British Empire ( OBE) in 2006. He now lives in western Massachusetts. The Lennoxville Library has half a dozen of his books, including Pacific and one audio book. Another half dozen are available through inter-library loan, including some in French.