I went into this book fully understanding the science would most likely be outdated - but was still surprised at just how much has changed since then. It's very eye-opening to see just how short our history of earth science knowledge is - as well as realizing how much we are still learning.

If I had the patience and the time, I would have fact checked everything in this book along side reading it to see if we were wrong at the time it was written or figured it out (maybe I will still sometime, I could end up with a very heavily annotated edition). There were multiple times I checked things and it turned out we discovered something else, plenty of instances where things are still the same as far as we know, and a few times it said we didn't know something and...we still don't know. I appreciated that it showed a love for the ocean and a humbleness in our understanding of it.

I mainly wanted to read this book because I love the ocean, and I wanted to read one of the biggest books in sharing knowledge about the ocean before there was a lot of that. I definitely found myself in lulls during reading this, but still enjoyed everything it shared with me. I had some slight feelings I might be more excited for this book than what I would get out of it, and intentionally read it before I check out Silent Spring.