Author(s): Francois Sarano

Animals/Natural History

"Oceans" is the official companion volume to the challenging, breathtakingly
beautiful documentary of the same name, created by Jacques Perrin and a
crack team of scientists, cinematographers, divers, and technical
specialists. A veteran of more than forty years of film-making and
exploring the natural world in works like The Monkey People and
Microcosmos, Perrin is the public face of an elite group that includes both
veterans of Jacques-Yves Cousteau's pioneering exploits and cutting-edge
innovators whose custom-created equipment captures never-before-witnessed
scenes.
From the tropics to Antarctica, from Norway to New Zealand, and from tiny
organisms at the bottom of the marine food chain to such magnificent
creatures as blue whales, polar bears, swordfish, and giant squid, this
vividly illustrated, deeply informative volume roams the seven-tenths of
Earth blanketed by oceans that make our blue planet so hospitable to life.
To capture the images here, divers swam unprotected among great white
sharks and patiently staked out the breeding grounds where families of
humpback whales sing their distinctive songs. Resourceful crew members
created everything from streamlined camera pods able to keep pace with
frolicking dolphins to a remote-controlled, mini-helicopter which hovered
over a pod of whales to obtain footage impossible otherwise. Photographers
invented a microscopic lens that revealed and recorded new universes of
plankton, algae, coral, and tiny fish eggs - the minute building blocks
that nourish this entire intricate, interdependent ecosystem.
Not just an authoritative, wide-ranging guide to the world's oceans, this
is also a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of practical film-making
under demanding, often difficult, sometimes downright dangerous conditions
... and, last but by no means least, it's a clear-eyed, timely, persuasive
preview of future seas: what we might have if we act now - and what we will
surely get if we don't.