In deep trouble

Atlantic by Simon Winchester and The Wave by Susan Casey are, at first glance, very different works. Atlantic is a historical-philosophical-fantastical meditation on the Atlantic ocean, from the ‘post-molten Hadean’ through the ‘cool meadows of today’s Holocene’, to the conjectured end-days of the ocean ‘about 170 million years’ from now. The Wave is a pithy account of some years Casey spent following the elite American surfer Laird Hamilton as he travelled from one storm-lashed coast to another in search of waves. Yet, on closer scrutiny, the two books have much in common: both authors are highly contemporary in the way they write about nature, with their mingling of humility and eschatology; both suggest that we have half-ruined the oceans they describe; both squint nervously into the darkness of the future.

‘In Victorian times,’ Winchester explains, ‘we thought of the ocean as vast and frightening: we still regarded it with some kind of awed respect.