Seventy percent of the surface, and most of the heat capacity.
9 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Introduction to Oceanography
Paul Webb · 2019
Walks a reader with no science background through the ocean's physics, chemistry, geology and biology as one connected story, built as an open…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The Depths of the Sea
Charles Wyville Thomson · 1873
Reports dredging living animals from ocean depths once assumed lifeless, overturning the 'azoic theory' and establishing that organisms survive at…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
The Oceans: Their Physics, Chemistry, and General Biology
H. U. Sverdrup, Martin W. Johnson & Richard H. Fleming · 1942
Treats the world ocean as one physical, chemical and biological system governed by the same conservation laws, the textbook that gave oceanography…
+5 more at this level
11 works
Paul Webb
Walks a reader with no science background through the ocean's physics, chemistry, geology and biology as one connected story, built as an open textbook so a first course needs no other text.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Wyville Thomson
Reports dredging living animals from ocean depths once assumed lifeless, overturning the 'azoic theory' and establishing that organisms survive at pressures and depths previously thought impossible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alfred C. Redfield
Argues the near-constant ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus found in both plankton and deep seawater is not coincidence but a two-way feedback between ocean chemistry and ocean life, the Redfield ratio.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Wallace S. Broecker
Sketches a single global circuit of deep and surface currents driven by density differences, and argues it can flip between states abruptly enough to explain sudden past climate shifts.
link checked 17 Sept 2026IPCC
Assesses the physical evidence that the ocean and the world's ice are absorbing most of the planet's excess heat and losing mass fast enough to already be reshaping coastlines and ecosystems.
link checked 17 Sept 2026H. U. Sverdrup, Martin W. Johnson & Richard H. Fleming
Treats the world ocean as one physical, chemical and biological system governed by the same conservation laws, the textbook that gave oceanography its first unified synthesis and its working vocabulary for decades after.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Henry Stommel
Shows mathematically why western boundary currents like the Gulf Stream are narrow and fast while their eastern counterparts are broad and weak, tracing the asymmetry to the Coriolis force changing with latitude.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Harry H. Hess
Proposes that new seafloor forms at mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward, carrying the ocean basins along like a conveyor belt and giving continental drift a physical mechanism for the first time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Frederick J. Vine & Drummond H. Matthews
Reads the striped pattern of magnetic reversals frozen into the seafloor either side of the mid-ocean ridge as a tape recording of seafloor spreading, turning Hess's hypothesis into a testable and confirmed prediction.
link checked 17 Sept 2026U.S. Army Coastal Engineering Research Center
Works coastal engineering out from first principles of wave mechanics into a design manual for beaches and structures, the reference that ended up defining professional coastal-engineering practice.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Ken Caldeira & Michael E. Wickett
Models future ocean chemistry under projected fossil-fuel emissions and shows surface pH falling faster than at any point in the last 300 million years, coining 'ocean acidification' as a named threat distinct from warming.
link checked 17 Sept 2026