Desolation, Destruction Define South Ocean

The title of Australian historian Joy McCann's chronicle of the Southern Ocean says it all: a sea wilder than any other, striated by latitudinal bands whose crescendo of nicknames (Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, Screaming Sixties) give more than a hint of its character. It is an aquatic realm, held apart from the grand narratives of human history by its remoteness. Stretching unimpeded by land around the southern belt of the planet, the Southern Ocean's perimeters are formed by latitude, climate and current patterns; otherwise it bleeds almost seamlessly into the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. McCann builds a picture of the sea: the motile mountains of waves that tumble through the Drake Passage, snow petrels and sooty albatrosses body-surfing the sea's surface, upside-down constellations as unfamiliar to northern hemisphere navigators as hieroglyphs.