'Tides' author explores one of world's most formidable phenomena

GREENLAND, N.H. - Jonathan White, author of TIDES: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean will speak and sign books at the Hugh Gregg Coastal Conservation Center (91 Depot Road, Greenland, NH) on June 22 at 1 p.m.

The event is hosted by the NH Fish and Game Department's Great Bay Discovery Center. Hardcover editions of the book will be available.

White is an expert mariner and marine conservationist whose love for the sea has been lifelong. In the 1980s, he founded the Resource Institute, a nonprofit educational organization for which he hosted a renowned seminar series aboard Crusader, a 65-foot wooden schooner that sailed the Pacific Northwest.

Crusader's odysseys nearly ended, however, in 1990 when the boat ran aground and was nearly destroyed on a large tide in Alaska's Kalinin Bay. Shaken and intrigued by his underestimation of tides and their power, White set off on a quest across the globe to understand the history, science, and majesty of one of our planet's most remarkable phenomena.

In TIDES: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean (Trinity University Press), White takes readers on a journey around the globe to witness the largest, fastest, scariest and most amazing tides in the world; he travels to the Arctic to shimmy down a hole in the ice with an Inuit elder to hunt for blue mussels in the dark cavities below; to the Qiantang River in China to witness the Silver Dragon, a twenty-five-foot tidal bore that crashes its way up the eighty-mile river; to California to see deadly waves as high as sixty feet.

White also demonstrates how, in this age of drastic global climate shifts, tides offer critical insight into the planet's future. On the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama, we see how the small island archipelago confronts sea level rise, and in Venice, Italy, how the city has been making extraordinary preparations for the coming effects of climate change.