From Victorian voyages to vanishing maps: Books in brief

"Similar to the global voyage of naturalist Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s, HMS Challenger's 1872-76 oceanographic expedition left a vast scientific legacy - although one less familiar than its predecessor's. The HMS Challenger 's crew members are "long gone, but the ship's imprint is still on the world's oceans", concludes Gillen D'Arcy Wood, an environmental historian. Wood's book revives the importance of the expedition's "floating marine laboratory" and reveals its relevance to the challenges the oceans face today."

""Climate defies easy definition," writes historian Melissa Charenko in her complex yet accessible book on the scientific study of the climate during the twentieth century. This research relied on climate proxies, which fall into two types. Physical proxies include fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites. Meanwhile, historical records such as diaries, photographs and ship logs can contain information about cloud cover and harvest dates. Today's challenge, Charenko argues, is to combine data from many proxies using modern computers."

"One of the many vivid details in geographer Jamie Woodward's brief history of Earth is palaeontologist Stephen Gould's demonstration of the planet's 4.5-billion-year lifespan during his lectures. Using his outstretched arm, Gould's shoulder marks Earth's formation, life appears at the elbow and the last millimetre of his middle fingernail represents the history of humans. Even so, Woodward's lively book devotes about one-quarter of its space to humans, while also addressing the "five great spheres of the Earth system"."

HMS Challenger's 1872–76 expedition established a vast scientific legacy and left an enduring imprint on the world's oceans, functioning as a floating marine laboratory relevant to modern ocean challenges. Climate reconstruction in the twentieth century relied on two proxy types: physical proxies such as fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites, and historical records like diaries, photographs and ship logs that record cloud cover and harvest dates. The central challenge is integrating diverse proxy data with modern computational methods. A concise Earth history compresses 4.5 billion years into vivid metaphors while treating human history as a small, recent portion and addressing the planet's major spheres.

Read at Nature