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A Book of Waves

Stefan Helmreich

Science & engineering

A Book of Waves

By Stefan Helmreich, professor of anthropology

Duke University Press · 2023

In this book, Helmreich examines ocean waves as forms of media that carry ecological, geopolitical, and climatological news about our planet. Drawing on ethnographic work with oceanographers and coastal engineers in the Netherlands, the United States, Australia, Japan, and Bangladesh, he details how scientists at sea and in the lab apprehend waves' materiality through abstractions, seeking to capture in technical language these avatars of nature at once periodic and irreversible, wild and pacific, ephemeral and eternal.

From Summer 2024 recommended reading from MIT (MIT News). Cover image via Google Books.