LITTLE BOOK OF BIG EXPLORATIONS

The science presenter, journalist and author who writes for BBC's Science Focus magazine developed her love of wildlife while growing up in the Caribbean. Here we are taken into adventures that changed everything, from the navigational instruments that have led us through unknown lands, to the advanced engineering that carried us into the depths of the ocean, to the rocket science that propelled us into space. Our insatiable curiosity has driven our survival as a species and here we can chart the ground-breaking sea voyage in 1735 that settled the debate raging between Descartes and Newton about the shape of the earth, to the balloon ride that led to the discovery of cosmic rays, and adventures yet to come, and whether some regions would be better left untouched by human hands. We go into the Amazon, read about an amorous butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine born in 1862, about SA Agulhas gliding slowly under Tower Bridge emblazoned with the words Seeing is Believing, the Great Northern Expedition, finding the Titanic, a cutaway drawing of a space shuttle, a huge robotic arm of the International Space Station and the Gedi mission of December 2018 and out to worlds beyond. 272pp, illus.