Bill Bryson - The Bounding Main

Bill Byson - The Bounding Main 

The chapter “The Bounding main” is about water and the oceans. Water is everywhere,  a potato is 80% , a tomato is 95% and a cow is 74% water . Water molecules move around constantly, pairing with other molecules and then moving along with another .This is why water has surface tension. There are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of water on earth and there won’t ever be any more because of the water cycle there will be the same amount of water. 97% of water on earth is in the ocean 51.6% of the ocean is the pacific.

The average Depth of the ocean is 3.86 kilometres. In the 1830s British naturalist Edward Forbes surveyed the ocean beds in the Atlantic and Mediterranean and declared there was no life in all the seas below 600 metres. This was proved wrong when one of the first transatlantic telegraph cables were hauled up for repairs from more than 3 kilometres down and was found to be thickly encrusted with corals, clams and other living  things.

In 1930 the first submarine to go 183 metres deep was a cast iron camber with walls 1.5 inches thick (3.81 cm) and had two small portholes containing quartz blocks 3 inches thick. It held only two men . the camber had no manoeuvrability it just hung at the end of a long cable. To neutralize their  own carbon dioxide produced from breathing. they opened cans of soda lime. The men inside were Charles William Beebe and Otis Barton .In 1934 They went down to just  over 900 metres. Barton was confident that the device was safe to a depth of about 900 metres. In 1958 Jacques Piccard designed and made a deal with the navy to build a new bathyscaphe (meaning “deep boat”) that he went down to 10,918 metres it took four hours to fall that far .repeating this today would cost at least $100 million.

It is estimated that about a quarter of every finishing net hauled  up contains “by catch” which is fish that can’t be taken to land because they are too small , are the wrong type or caught in the wrong season. For every kilogram of shrimp harvested, about four kilograms of fish and other marine creatures are destroyed.

Around 1957/8 there was lots of nuclear wastes to get rid of so most countries were just putting their radioactive gunk in metal drums and threw them overboard. It wasn’t very smart because the type of drums they used are the ones you see rusting behind petrol stations. With no protective lining of any type. When they failed to sink the drums where shot at until they did but  this release plutonium , uranium and strontium . before dumping waste was halted in the 1990’s the united states , Russia , china , Japan , New Zealand (The book said NZ but I didn’t think that NZ had ever had any form of nuclear power?) and nearly all the nations of Europe had dumped some form of Nuclear waste into the ocean.

By Ethan Roylance