A candid personal account of the career and life of a pioneer in the field of deep-sea diving.

"Sealab" tells the story of how the U.S. Navy program tried to develop the marine equivalent of the space station--and why the Navy pulled the plug. Hellwarth has interviewed surviving members of the three Sealab experiments in addition to conducting archival research to tell this first comprehensive story about the Sealab program.

This book furthers academic scholarship in cutting-edge areas of geographical and geopolitical writing by drawing on a series of little-studied undersea living projects conducted by the US Navy during the Cold War (Project Genesis, Sealab I, II and III). Supported by an engaging and novel empirical setting, the central themes of the book revolve around the practice and construct of ‘territory’, ‘terrain’, the ‘elemental’ and the interrelationships between these material phenomenon and both human and non-human bodies. Furthermore, the book will point to future research trajectories in the form of ‘extreme geographies’ to better understand living practices in a world that is increasingly submerged and extreme.

In 1952, at age sixteen, Sylvia Earle—then a budding marine biologist—borrowed a friend’s copper diving helmet, compressor, and pump and slipped below the waters of a Florida river. It was her first underwater dive. Since then, Earle has descended to more than 3,000 feet in a submersible and, despite beginning at a time when few women were taken seriously as marine scientists, has led or participated in expeditions totaling more than 7,000 hours underwater, and counting. Equal parts memoir, adventure tale, and call to action, Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans has become a classic of environmental literature, at once the gripping adventure story of Earle’s three decades of undersea exploration, an insider’s introduction to the dynamic field of marine biology, and an urgent plea for the preservation of the world’s fragile and rapidly deteriorating ocean ecosystems. Featuring a gallery of color photographs and a new preface by Earle, this new edition of Sea Change arrives at a uniquely pivotal time when its message is needed more than ever before. She writes, “I want to share the exhilaration of discovery, and convey a sense of urgency about the need for all of us to use whatever talents and resources we have to continue to explore and understand the nature of this extraordinary ocean planet.” Her message is clear: how we treat the oceans now will determine the future health of the planet—and our species.

A cultural history of living in the undersea, both fictional and real, from Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo to NASA’s ECC02 project. In Memo for Nemo, William Firebrace investigates human inhabitation of the undersea, both fictional and real. Beginning with Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo—an undersea Renaissance man with a library of 12,000 volumes on his submarine—and proceeding through aquariums, undersea photography, artificial seas on land, nuclear-powered submarines, undersea film epics, giant squid, and NASA satellites, Firebrace examines the undersea as a zone created by exploration and invention. Throughout, the history of undersea life is accompanied by an imagined undersea, envisioned by cultural figures ranging from Verne and Herman Melville to Orson Welles and Jimi Hendrix. Firebrace takes readers though the enormous sequence of rooms (impossible in real life) in Nemo’s submarine, recounts the competition among nineteenth-century cities to build the most spectacular aquatic world, and explains the workings of the bathysphere—an early underwater vessel modeled on a hot-air balloon. He considers the aquarium’s function in films as a sort of viewing lens, describes the chlorine-proof artificial sea life seen by passengers on the submarine ride at Disneyland, and reports that Jacques Cousteau’s famous underwater documentaries were in fact highly staged. The oceans of today are not those imagined by Verne; they are changing from both natural processes and human influence. Memo for Nemo documents the power of the undersea in both art and life.

Examines a handful of famous ocean explorers and naturalists--including Jacque Cousteau, Thor Heyerdahl, and Rachel Carson, among others--to demonstrate how their work helped shape the way many Americans would think about, and interact with, the ocean.

By the author of the 2009 National Book Award winner, Let the Great World Spin, this critically acclaimed novel delves deep into the underbelly of New York.