Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean »

JULIA WHITTY's first book on oceans, The Fragile Edge, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal Award, the PEN USA Award, and the Kiriyama Prize. Her cover articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine and Mother Jones, where she is an environmental correspondent. She blogs at the Blue Marble and Deep Blue Home.

At the center of Deep Blue Home is Julia Whitty’s penetrating exploration of the World Ocean as a single body of water connected by a vast and powerful threedimensional current encircling the globe. This undivided body of water profoundly controls and is controlled by Earth’s climate; its fate determines our own.

Whitty’s career—first in science, later as a documentary filmmaker, and always as a writer and diver—has given her sustained access to the scientists dedicated to the study of an astonishing range of ocean life, from the physiology of “extremophile” life forms to the strategies of nesting seabirds to the ecology of “whale falls,” or what happens in the afterlife of a behemoth.

No stranger to extreme adventure, Whitty travels the oceanside and underwater world from the Sea of Cortés to Newfoundland to the Galápagos. Her book provides extraordinary armchair entree to gripping adventure, cutting-edge science, and an intimate understanding of our deep blue home.

The Washington Post - Thomas Hayden

…a dream of a book, vivid yet languorous, rich in detail, richer still in emotional impact. By anchoring her wide-ranging meditation to personal memories of a decades-distant season of ornithological research in the Gulf of California, Whitty distills the oceanic vastness into something bright, enticing and just manageable enough to be captured in a bottle. She also crystallizes the particular frustration of scientists who, while striving to understand the complex webs of marine life, have watched them torn asunder faster than they can be catalogued, let alone conserved.