The Crest of the Wave: Adventures in Oceanography

by Willard Bascom

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060159278
• ISBN13: 9780060159276
• Release Date: January 1988
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 16 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

THIS BOOK SHOULD NOT BE OUT OF PRINT!

This is a classic book! Not only for those interested in the ocean, but for those interested in LIFE. It is amazing what Willard Bascom went through - how curiosity took him through a death sentence of cancer, how he rode waves in a style the biggest-wave surfers would never DREAM of, purely in order to measure the shoreline of the western U.S. This book is a gripper, an absolute classic. READ IT if you can find a copy!

Great book about oceans and oceanographers

A real read! Highly recommended to those interested in oceans, and tracking the career of one of the most interesting scientists around. Opportunities like this could only come during this middle part of our century, and it takes a tremendous individual to take advantage and "ride the wave."The book is well written, easy and entertaining to read, and remarkably understated. Recommended.

Oceanographer heros fight villans and display daring do.

Oceanography grew up after World War II, and its growth is the story of Willard Bascom's career. Over a span of 40 years we find him studying waves and beaches, exploring for diamonds, measuring atomic blasts, advising the U.S. Navy on amphibious operations, salvaging ships, inventing deep-sea drilling and wet suits, fighting bureaucracies, and suing the CIA. Those of us growing up reading Scientific American in the 1950's and 1960's recall him mainly as an occasional author of articles on physical oceanography and ocean technology. Bascom's technical articles were flavored them with anecdotes, characters, and impressions of the sea. Bascom's book, The Crest of the Wave {Harper and Row) approaches oceanography from the opposite direction. It is an anecdotal account of ocean exploration and science with a little hint of technical material added. The result is a science adventure complete with heros, villians, entrepeneurship, and daring do. The heros, of course, are oceanographers, who take to the hostile sea in tiny, sometimes inadequate ships fitted with ingenious, sometimes recalcitrant devices. They are "can do guys," who fight storms and sea, finagle budgets, and finesse machinery. They mortgage their houses to start businesses and make stock deals. These are 80s-style heros living in the 1950s and 60s. The villians are drawn from the usual suspects. There is Lyndon Johnson interfering with project Mohole in the interest of Brown and Root, or the CIA stealing patents, or the Government of Bahamas trying to renege on a lease, or friends and associates corrupted by the find of a treasure galleon, or a recalcitrant bureaucracy intent on protecting its prerogatives. Daring do? What sort of daring do is found in an oceanography book? There is the usual stuff. Rescuing survivors of air crashes, scientists being swept overboard and lost, the loss of the tug Collinstar with all hands in a storm on the Skeleton Coast. There is the first deep sea drilling. Bascom was commissioned by NSF to design and prove a drill ship that could drill in water 100 times deeper than any previous holes. Using only 60% of a skimpy $2.5 million budget, Bascom managed to build CUSS I, the first ship to use dynamic positioning; and a ship John Steinbeck described as having "...the clean lines of an outhouse standing on a garbage scow." Not only did dynamic positioning work perfectly in its first deep water test, it did so in 14 foot waves, force 7 winds, and strong currents. Like the early space program, it was science working in the glare of publicity. CUSS I was the forerunner of the Glomar Challenger, which by now has drilled a hundred miles of hole in every ocean and provided us with nearly all we know about history of the ocean basins. The chapter on ocean pollution is especially appropriate in view of recent renewed concern over dumping in the ocean. It provides a highly readable account on long research into the dumping of sewage