Dorrik Stow

Some 250 million years ago, the great supercontinent of Pangea formed, on the eve of a great extinction that bookmarked both the close of the Permian period and the Paleozoic era; the future belonged the first dinosaurs. To the east of Pangea was a vast sea known as Tethys. When the forces of plate tectonics broke Pangea up into massive component land masses, Tethys formed a great equatorial sea between the northern Laurasia and the southern Gondwanaland, expanding east-west ocean show more circulation that saw the birth of modern marine life. By five million years ago, Tethys was no more; all that remains of her today is the Mediterranean Sea. In Vanished Ocean: How Tethys Reshaped the World, author Dorrik Stow – a renowned geologist and oceanographer who specializes in deep ocean research – not only traces the long lifecycle of Tethys but utilizes this structure as a framework to probe plate tectonics, evolution, extinction events, oceanic conveyor belts, geology, climate change, of origin of fossil fuels, and much, much more!
Vanished Ocean is a brilliant work and clearly a labor of love for Stow, whose elegant writing style turns complex scientific concepts into an immensely readable narrative that is comprehensible for the most part to the general reader with at least some familiarity with earth science principles. This is enhanced by a number of tables, illustrations and maps, as well as an ample “glossary of terms,” neatly accented by appropriate snippets of Pablo Neruda verse at the face of each chapter. It is clear from his passion that for Stow the processes of the earth and the evolution of both the organic and inorganic that it hosts represent a kind of poetry in motion, and his enthusiasm is eminently contagious for the reader, even in the occasional moments when the concepts are so complex that a paragraph may need to be re-read more than once. Still, if you know something about plate tectonics and evolution, there is nothing here that is not accessible. It is a real treat to listen to Stow relate the story – along with anecdotes of his life and travels that clearly reveal that even after a lifetime of research he remains as delightfully full of wonder as an eight year old child as the processes of the planet – much of these echoes of a far distant era -- are exposed.
There is controversy here, as well. Stow does not buy into the accepted catastrophic theory of dinosaur extinction, which a scientific consensus today attributes to a massive asteroid collision 65 million years ago at the Chicxulub Crater beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula in what is geologically referred to as the “KT Boundary Event” that marks the end of both the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era. Stow argues with great conviction that given the frequency of mass extinction events over the long geologic history of the earth, there are plenty of ingredients in place – such as climate change and the continental drift of plate tectonics – to account for such an extinction without introducing an extra-planetary event. I lack the expertise to parse Stow’s dissent. On the other hand, Stow is a distinguished scientist – not some talking head with a political axe to grind – and his opposing views are worthy of respect even if these defy the current accepted theory.
I will not pretend to have absorbed all of the complicated concepts of Vanished Ocean, but it was a most enjoyable read and I may one day even read it again in order to better comprehend the immense range of the material that Stow has packed into what is after all, a rather small volume given the enormity of its content. I would highly recommend this book both to scientists and non-scientists alike. show less

While I might have wished for more science and less memoir of Stow's career, you will get a vivid picture of what it meant for the natural world for there to be one super continent and one super ocean on this planet, and the processes by which we arrived at our current world. Probably the most controversial point in the book is that Stow insists that the Chixuclub meteor impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period is highly overrated as an explanation for that mass-extinction event; Stow is show more more inclined to blame the march of plate tectonics and a super volcano event disrupting the existing climate for the sweeping changes of life recorded in the fossil record. Also, though Stow has spent a good part of his working life in the employ of the the petroleum industry, he does believe in the abuse of fossil fuels as a contribution to global warming. show less

Part history of an ocean that disappeared, part memoir, part discussion on evolution, part travelogue, part history of the world - this is probably the shortest way to describe this book. The author is a scientist, a specialist in deep water mud (which surprisingly does not mean under water sediments) and the book is his story of an ocean he had spent most of his life chasing. There is not even an attempt to show all possible theories and classifications - he is one of the scientists that show more had done the legwork and have his theories and even if he mentions anyone else's current theories in passing, he does not delve into them (for example he mentions that some scientists are talking about different stages of the ocean but makes it clear that for him all stages are still the same ocean... and then never mentions the other names).

The word variety describes the book perfectly - you are reading about the whales and how they went back into the water and next thing you know you are reading about a plane ride in China, dinosaur eggs in South Korea and an almost abduction in Kashmir; description of nowadays Tunisia or Brazil is closely followed by a discussion of the formation of ocean crust; a memory about his first job is sharing space with a very good introduction to plate tectonics; a recommendation for a wine in a specific region is followed by an explanation of the oceanic current of the past and present; a discussion on the dating methods for rocks is followed by a discussion of the evolution of fish (and the fact that sharks had survived pretty much anything and are still around). It sounds as something that cannot work together but somehow surprisingly it does.

The Tethys in question is the ocean that formed along the east shores of Pangaea - this huge continent that once contain almost all the continental masses of the Earth. It saw the appearance and disappearance of dinosaurs and the beginning of the reign of the mammals. It formed about 260 mln years ago and closed ~5.3 mln years ago. Tethys is responsible for the Himalayas (together with plate tectonics that is), the Mediterranean (together with plate tectonics again) and most of the mountains of Europe (again)... It is also the ocean that helped life evolve and survived; that made most of the oil reserves possible. Parts of the ocean floor can be found anywhere - in the cliffs of England and the highest parts of Himalaya; even at the bottom of some of the current seas and oceans.

Stow works chronologically and each chapter covers a few million years - usually concentrating on some huge event that starts or closes the period. Two big extinctions; the great flood (not the Bible one and some land does stay up but the biggest that had been seen by the earth), the formation of the Earth continents as we know them. And while racing through time, he manages to bring up the names of his students and colleagues (took a trip with someone to go look at rocks? Let's mention them), the history of the science and changes that happened in it, the evolutionary theories and what life had been in Tethys. The book changes from very scientific and technical to layman and back almost constantly - shifting almost in the same way as the ocean is shifting. His explanations on why it is almost impossible for a meteorite or a supervolcano to have killed the dinosaurs is done in a style that anyone that has understood the main principles of plate tectonics and the climate changes brought by that can understand it; on the other hand some of his explanations of life and changes in it in the ocean went way too technical (but then geology and climatology had always been easier for me than biology so that may have been part of the problem).

And at the end, he even projects how the Earth continents will look in 50 mln years based on what we had already seen happening.

Of course there is a lot that noone knows yet so in these cases Stow explains his hypothesis and why he believes this is the case. The story he is telling is coherent; the story of Tethys is the story of life. Maybe Tethys was not that important and some of the evolution happened in the other oceans; maybe some of the things we believe now will get disproved tomorrow. But the book is a glimpse in a past before we even existed and as such the fact that we actually know something is impressive enough.

I am not sure who I would recommend this book to though - it is a bit too technical for someone that just want to read about the past and it contains way too much non-scientific information to be suitable for scientists. On the other hand, if someone is ready for a journey through time and through the author's career and is not too afraid to work hard on the scientific parts, it actually is pretty readable and interesting. show less

A popsci book about the Tethys Ocean, in the form of a "biography" that follows its development and that of life in and around it during an approximate quarter billion years.

Unfortunately, I have a number of problems with it. First, far too many pages are taken up by anecdotes about Stow's non-geological experiences in geologically significant places. If I want to learn what wine to order in Almería, I'll pick up a wine book, not a geology one. Second, the actual geological history is told show more in vignettes and generalities, making it hard to form a coherent pictue of it. I don't know just how coherent a story it's currently possible to tell about the Tethys Ocean, but surely one can do better than this. Frex, he briefly alludes to a number of different "Tethys Oceans" (Proto-Tethys, Paleo-Tethys, Neo-Tethys) that some geologists distinguish, but fails to explain the distinctions (from other sources I gather it's to do with a sequence of separate oceanic basins in turn occupying approximately the same region). Third, he makes a number of strange pronouncements when he strays into astronomy and paleontology. Most remarkably, he appears to believe that Maastrichtian (latest Cretaceous) dinosaurs were restricted to western North America, which makes it hard to take what he says about the end-Cretaceous mass extinction very seriously. Oh, and since there's no footnotes one can't even guess where the odder ideas come from.

Now, the book isn't all bad, some of the geological vignettes are nice in particular, even if found in a literary conglomerate, and if one needs a basic introduction to plate tectonics one will be found here, albeit split into a number of sections in different chapters. But overall it's definitely a disappointment. show less