Description
People with many disciplines are engaged in study of the sea and each discipline needs access to the basic premises of the others. I hope that parts of this book are readable enough to be of interest to engineers and biologists who need a little more background in the physical aspects of the sea. I am conscious that the book is not uniformly easy. My treatment of tides and of optical and acoustic questions is basic and practical, while the topic of winddriven currents is perhaps too theoretical for most readers. The difficult question of surface waves cannot be properly treated at this level or, indeed, by this author. The different chapters do not depend greatly on each other; each is an essay on its own topic.