World Atlas of the Oceans: More than 300 Maps and Charts of the Ocean Floor Hardcover – October 6, 2001

This book and the world wide project of mapping the ocean floors is amazing. Beautiful and educational, every page is so interesting and the photos are stunning. Like other coffee table books....it's big....this book is perfect to keep out and just thumb through now and again. And if there are children in the house it's a great reference. So glad I bought it.

Great Atlas, recommended

I was very pleased to get my hands on this book.It is huge and heavy.I think I'd call it, "An Annotated World Atlas of the Oceans With Many Encyclopedic-Like Pages and Coverage of All Things Oceanic."Thus, it is not a baby book, but is certainly generalist in approach.- it is primarily maps and charts: bathymetric, relief maps, satellite images- there are spreads with coverage of topics such as trade routes, the history of oceanic discovery, currents, global tectonics, "How the Oceans Were Formed," oil rigs, "Predatory Fish in the Deep Seas," "Food from the Seas," and container ports.One of the ideal consumers of this book would be an 11 to 19 year old with a love of oceans, of diving, of discovery and voyage, of maps, or of commerce.(Or someone like me, who has no great expertise in this area, but finds the book difficult to put down.)

Not for people who sail

Great reference book for understanding the oceans and their effects on life on earth. Enjoyed the great pictures and information contained in the book.

I have been reading about underwater exploration. A "World Atlas of the Oceans" sounded like the perfect study companion.I was hoping for a really good, well indexed, collection of maps that covered the entire ocean floor. I was not able to determine how much of the ocean is covered by the included maps.)The lack of an index to the maps makes it difficult to look up and, go to a map of any particular place. The table of contents lists each map by the title of the short essay that accompanies each map. So, if you have not read and recalled the essay you can't know what map you will find. In fact the entire book is a long series of articles and essays about the oceans. Lots of pretty pictures, and titillating, short introductions to interesting subjects. It IS a beautiful book, and a great intro to our underwater world, that is why I gave this book more than one star.A map of the 200 beautiful maps would have made this book actually useful.

It is rare to see an atlas of the seas showing ineteresting details of this most important part of the ecosystem.