The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline

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Gillen D’Arcy Wood

The Wake of HMS Challenger

Name: The Wake of HMS Challenger
Price: 49.99 AUD
Availability: PreOrder
ISBN: 9780691233246

How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline

Gillen D’Arcy Wood

$49.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
Pre-Order now

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English

Miscellaneous
01 March 2026

History; History of science; Oceanography (seas); Geographical discovery & exploration

A scientific adventure story that dramatises how profoundly our oceans have changed over the past 150 years.

In December 1872, HMS Challenger embarked on the first round-the-world oceanographic expedition. Its goal: to shine a light for the first time on the mysteries of the deep sea. For the next four years, Challenger's naturalists explored the oceans, encountering never-before-seen marvels of marine life. The expedition's achievements are the stuff of legend. It identified major ocean currents and defining features of the seafloor, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and Mariana Trench. It measured worldwide sea temperatures and chemistry, creating baseline data for all ocean research since. And, most spectacularly of all, it collected nearly five thousand sea creatures and plants new to science. In The Wake of HMS Challenger, Gillen D'Arcy Wood looks afresh at this legendary scientific odyssey and shows why, 150 years later, its legacy looms larger than ever.

The Challenger's scientists had no way of knowing that the incredible undersea aquarium they were documenting was on the verge of catastrophic change. Off Portugal, they encountered a brilliant starfish now threatened with extinction by microplastics; in St. Thomas, teeming coral habitats that today have been decimated by ocean warming; and at remote Ascension Island, the breeding grounds of the now-endangered green turtle. Lyrical and elegiac, The Wake of HMS Challenger offers a stunning before-and-after picture of our global oceans. It is both a reminder of what we have lost since the Victorian age and an urgent call to preserve what remains of the diverse life and wild beauty of our planet's final frontier.

By: Gillen D’Arcy Wood
Imprint: Miscellaneous
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780691233246
ISBN 10: 0691233241
Pages: 328
Publication Date: 01 March 2026
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Gillen D'Arcy Wood is the Robert W. Schaefer Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of the award-winning Tambora: The Eruption That Changed the World and Land of Wondrous Cold: The Race to Discover Antarctica and Unlock the Secrets of Its Ice (both Princeton).

Reviews for The Wake of HMS Challenger: How a Legendary Victorian Voyage Tells the Story of Our Oceans' Decline

""An invigorating environmental history.""---Hannah Pearson, Foreword Reviews ""A vivid portrait of the ocean during its age of innocence and what has followed."" * Kirkus Reviews *