<i>Oceans</i> is the official companion volume to the challenging, breathtakingly<br>beautiful documentary of the same name, &#160;created by Jacques Perrin and a<br>crack team of scientists, cinematographers, divers, and technical<br>specialists. A veteran of more than forty years of film-making and<br>exploring the natural world in works like The Monkey People and<br>Microcosmos, Perrin is the public face of an elite group that includes both<br>veterans of Jacques-Yves Cousteau&rsquo;s pioneering exploits and cutting-edge<br>innovators whose custom-created equipment captures never-before-witnessed<br>scenes.<br><br>From the tropics to Antarctica, from Norway to New Zealand, and from tiny<br>organisms at the bottom of the marine food chain to such magnificent<br>creatures as blue whales, polar bears, swordfish, and giant squid, this<br>vividly illustrated, deeply informative volume roams the seven-tenths of<br>Earth blanketed by oceans that make our blue planet so hospitable to life.<br>To capture the images here, divers swam unprotected among great white<br>sharks and patiently staked out the breeding grounds where families of<br>humpback whales sing their distinctive songs. Resourceful crew members<br>created everything from streamlined camera pods able to keep pace with<br>frolicking dolphins to a remote-controlled, mini-helicopter which hovered<br>over a pod of whales to obtain footage impossible otherwise. Photographers<br>invented a microscopic lens that revealed and recorded new universes of<br>plankton, algae, coral, and tiny fish eggs &ndash; the minute building blocks<br>that nourish this entire intricate, interdependent ecosystem.<br><br>Not just an authoritative, wide-ranging guide to the world&rsquo;s oceans, this<br>is also a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of practical film-making<br>under demanding, often difficult, sometimes downright dangerous conditions<br>&hellip; and, last but by no means least, it&rsquo;s a clear-eyed, timely, persuasive<br>preview of future seas: what we might have if we act now &ndash; and what we will<br>surely get if we don&rsquo;t.