FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“A riveting book of revelations about earth’s largest and most important habitat.”
Tim Flannery

“As I read Seasick, I thought of biologist writer Rachel Carson.… If climate change had been recognized when Carson was writing about the ocean, she would have written a book like Seasick.”
Brian Harvey, Canadian Geographic

“This is an important book about the state of two-thirds of our planet. We may fear the fate of the atmosphere, but the ocean is the atmosphere’s big brother. Its hidden depths determine what happens in our world.”
Fred Pearce, New Scientist

Seasick
Ocean Change and the Extinction of Life on Earth
ALANNA MITCHELL

In September, President Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force released its first report, recommending the creation of a new National Ocean Council to coordinate federal response to ocean pollution, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification, among other problems. With the creation of the NOC, the new administration is signaling that healthy oceans matter. But the task before the council is enormous, given that the sea is, well, sick.

Veteran science journalist Alanna Mitchell reveals just how dire the situation is in Seasick. Here, she dives beneath the surface of the world’s oceans to give readers a sense of how this watery realm has been defiled—and what can be done to manage and preserve it, and with it life on earth. With Mitchell at the helm, readers submerge 3,000 feet to gather sea sponges that may contribute to cancer care, see firsthand the lava lampûlike dead zone covering 17,000 square kilometers in the Gulf of Mexico, and witness the simultaneous spawning of corals under a full moon in Panama.

The first book to look at the planetary environmental crisis through the lens of the global ocean, Seasick takes the reader on an emotional journey through a hidden area of the planet and urges conservation and reverence for the fount from which all life on earth sprang.

Alanna Mitchell spent fourteen years as a writer covering trends, science, and the environment at the Globe and Mail. She is the author of Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

Please contact Stephanie Hlywak at (773) 702-0376 or shlywak@press.uchicago.edu for more information.

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