Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com

Average Customer Rating:

stunning overview of the water world	Customer Rating:
huge,bottomless,overwhelming as the worlds oceans this awesome tome provides hours of mind blowing eye candy with great educational text.this book uses state of the art photography & excellent graphics.dk are the best when it comes to visual guides.

Surpassed expectations

Customer Rating:

This book contains stunning pictures, interesting fact and information, information on the most spectacular beaches and ocean crated phenomena, tidal and wave phenomena, weather related phenomena, and information on many, many species of sharks, whales, jellyfish, fish, crabs, coral, etc. A must buy for any ocean/nature lovers, nonfiction coffee table book fans/collectors, or anyone who just love interesting facts and appreciates stunning photography.

A visual and informational feast!

Customer Rating:

This is a huge book packed with information and gorgeous photography. There is plenty of science contained in these glossy pages from how the planets in our solar system formed, to the breakup and movement of our land masses to their current day positions, ocean currents, weather, ecology, glacial periods, and so much more. Most of the first half of the book is devoted to these subjects. The second half of the book gets into ocean life, from the smallest to the largest, how they live, feed, defend themselves. The pictures are breathtaking. This is a great educational book for all family members. Trust me, this one won't just sit around on your coffee table.

Wonderful science book on the Ocean

Customer Rating:

This book is not a typical "coffee table" book. Although full of beautiful photographs, there is equal emphasis on educational text. Instead of being a book containing only full-page photos of ocean life, each page is a collage of wonderful photos and short articles that you will want to read. The publisher of this book (DK), offers a variety of books in this format (travel, etc), and the layout of this book is similar. That is not to knock the photos at all - they are great and some are full-page, but this book isn't page after page of full-page photos as some others are. That said, this is an excellent educational text with so much interesting information to offer. (It made me want to read the book cover-to-cover, which would probably keep me busy for at least a few days!) The four main sections of the book include: Introduction Ocean Environments Ocean Life Atlas of the Oceans The Introduction section takes a scientific look at the earth. A sampling of the topics of this section include "The Evolution of the Oceans", "Tectonics and the Ocean Floor", "Hurricanes", and "El Nino and La Nina". Mixed in with the photos are a number of color drawings and graphs to help the reader understand the concepts. The section on Ocean Environments includes articles on specific places like San Francisco Bay and Hardanger Fjord as well as general information on habitats such as Salt Marshes, Mangrove Swamps and Rocky Sea Beds. The pages are full of photos of the areas as well as typical species found there. The largest section is on Ocean Life and focuses on the variety of creatures found in the sea. Exhibited within these pages are a number of amazing photos of plants and animals that I had not seen before (though I'm not an expert on this subject) including creatures such as the Glass Squid, the Blue-Ringed Octopus and the Goblin Shark. I thoroughly enjoyed the short paragraph articles describing unique aspects of the species shown as well as the longer texts on topics like "Echinoderms" that includes anatomy, reproduction, feeding and defense sub-articles. The last section is Atlas of the Oceans and includes maps of the different oceans and text describing them. Again, the focus of this book is learning, not just amazing photography, and it does an excellent job of offering a smorgasbord of articles on different topics. If you really want to learn about the ocean and its inhabitants while paging through fantastic photographs, you will thoroughly enjoy this book!

NOT THE GREAT COFFEE TABLE BOOK!	Customer Rating:
NOT 500 pages and if I had paused to read the item description properly I wouldn't have bought this book! Way too good a price to be true, it is not another edition of the wonderful Cousteau-forwarded book, but a perfectly respectable DK full-color children's book with many very nice color photos. Probably very worth $7.99 and I was just far too greedy to read the fine print.