Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice.
Wood applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline, and reported the following:
My book on the 1870s ocean discovery voyage of HMS Challenger is a catalogue of wonders, which page 99 exemplifies in spectacular fashion. There we meet, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a blind lobster brought up from the deep sea by the ship's trawl, an enigmatic monster that to Challenger's scientists seemed to defy all Darwinian logic of survival.Learn more about The Wake of HMS Challenger at the Princeton University Press website.
Mysteries and marvels abounded during Challenger's legendary four-year expedition around the world, the first ever commissioned to explore the hidden depths of the seas. It was a wildly successful mission. The Challengers brought home almost 5000 species new to science, along with brilliant corals, sponges from the earliest era of life on Earth, and clouds of microscopic plankton scooped from the sunstruck surface of the ocean waters. They also collected reams of data on ocean temperature, chemistry, and deep sea currents. From Challenger's incredible round-the-world bounty emerged the modern sciences of oceanography and marine biology.
Why is this amazing marine collection from the late nineteenth century still important? Because it offers a snapshot of the world's oceans on the eve of industrialization, and a vivid contrast to our deteriorating oceans of today. Overfishing, ocean warming, and plastic pollution threaten the stunning real-world aquarium the Victorians encountered, and my book, with the Challenger voyage as its baseline, charts the changes human colonization of the seas has wrought over the last 150 years.
But wonder abides, on page after page of my book and in our still resilient oceans. Later on page 99 finds our intrepid naturalists' lingering on the Challenger's deck after midnight, mesmerized by the brilliant luminescence of the sea's lilting surface. Millions of living creatures combined to produce this "dazzling illumination that reached even in the rigging, where the men working the sails appeared like ghosts eerily lit against the black sky." While my book's focus is on the wild phantasmagoria of marine life, the trials of our first deep sea explorers loom large, too. The deep sea lobster of page 99, the Willemoesia leptodactyla, is named for one of Challenger's naturalists, its youngest member, who paid for his curiosity and passion for the sea with his life.
The Page 99 Test: Tambora.
--Marshal Zeringue
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