Marine physicist Alexander Thompson invites readers onto the R/V Selene, a research vessel tracing light across water, ice, and salt. From McMurdo Sound's brinicles to the glassy gypsum lagoons of Baja California, he shows how photons carve paths, scatter in plankton blooms, and vanish into abyssal blue. With hyperspectral cameras, portable LiDAR, and a battered field notebook, he maps a world where reflection becomes measurement.
Reflections in the Crystal Sea blends optics and oceanography to explain climate signals hidden in color, glare, and shine. Thompson decodes satellite ocean color, ice–albedo feedbacks in the Fram Strait, and the mirror-like calm of Namibia's Dragon's Breath Cave as natural laboratories. Along the way, he unpacks radiative transfer with kitchen-sink demos, diffraction gratings, and ice cores, revealing why the sea sometimes looks like polished stone and sometimes like ink.
Adopted several passages for class. The ray diagrams, the pan-of-water demo for albedo, and the plain-English explanation of LiDAR over water are gold for teaching. My students now argue about photons at lunch, which feels like a win.
Solid science that sometimes reads like lecture notes. The mix of travelogue and textbook doesn't always gel, but the sections on brine channels and uncertainty bands in hyperspectral data are worth the price of admission. I learned a lot; I also skimmed more than I wanted to.
This book is the shimmer on a still lagoon. The Dragon's Breath Cave sequence had me holding my breath, and the Baja gypsum lagoons chapter is pure sensory science—salt on the lips, glare in the eyes, photons everywhere.
I loved the small details: a diffraction grating held over a coffee mug, the scuffed field notebook, the improvised LiDAR mount. It's rigorous but never brittle, generous without dumbing down. Take my stars!!
Clear, careful, and beautifully illustrated. Thompson's walk-through of satellite ocean color and the discussion of ice–albedo feedbacks in the Fram Strait are standouts, and the diagrams finally made bidirectional reflectance click for one of my students. A touch dense in the mid-book math chapter, but overall an excellent bridge between research and public understanding.
Gorgeous, lucid science writing. The chapters aboard the R/V Selene and the scenes under brinicle forests in McMurdo Sound are mesmerizing. Every spectral plot is explained without hand-waving, and the field notes sprinkled throughout make the physics feel human. I closed the book wanting to point a spectrometer at every puddle.
I wanted more stories and fewer equations. The radiative transfer sections dragged for me, and the jargon piled up fast. Cool topic, but it felt like a seminar when I was hoping for a seafaring adventure with some science on the side.
