The River in the Sea (How the Gulf Stream System Made (and Is Unmaking) Our World)

A wondrous journey along the greatest ocean current—classic travel writing and celebrations of natural wonders under threat

Our world is a freak of nature. The finely balanced arrangement of ice at the poles and heat in the tropics is a once in a billion-year miracle of physics - made and sustained by the cooling system of the planet: ocean currents. The Gulf Stream system moves more water than all the freshwater rivers of the earth combined and four hundred times more energy than the United States consumes in a year.

In The River in the Sea, Ben Rawlence travels along this most crucial of all earth systems—from its origins in Panama to the Florida Straits, Cape Hatteras, the UK, Norway, Iceland and the Azores. He explores its role in unlocking the European arrival in the Caribbean and North America, in the foundation of diets, currencies and civilizations in Europe, and in the great whirlpools that lock away human carbon pollution in the Arctic and fill the deep ocean basins of the world. The Atlantic Ocean system is not just the foundation of the natural world; it is the unseen foundation of the human world we have built. And we rely on it still, to buffer and mask the impacts of global heating. But this artery of life on earth is faltering. What happens when the motion in the ocean stops? This sweeping, eye-opening and gorgeous journey is both a celebration of the miraculous ocean system that has made our world and an urgent call to protect it.