Sound Images of the Ocean in Research and Monitoring

Call me Moby. The dream of every marine acoustician and seismologist is to image the ocean, the seafloor, and the subseafloor from the perspective of a whale's ear or, if the abyss weren't utterly dark, a fish's eye. Peter Wille's ambitious and remarkable, yet idiosyncratic compilation of sound translated into visual images of the ocean realm is perhaps the next best thing. The meat of the volume and accompanying CD-ROM consists of 452 mostly fascinating, mostly color images, all helpfully indexed at the start of the book, representing the contributions of more than 120 scientists from 22 nations. Those latter two numbers produce shudders and tics, if not migraines, in anyone who's ever assembled a volume involving contributions from even an order of magnitude fewer contributors.