The book’s title is slightly confusing (I thought at first it was a history of the world’s oceans), but water is the foundational and liminal element on the blue planet, as liquid, as ice, as water vapour. Its circulation and transformation through those states on the surface of the Earth and the atmosphere are what fundamentally drive the global climate, and consequently almost everything else. As ice sheets, as oceans, as clouds, as rain, as rivers – ‘constantly transmuted by the energy of the sun, water provides the mechanism by which energy flows through the landscape’.

As excellent historians do, Dry takes us intimately into the lives and passions of her six key characters: John Tyndall, Charles Piazzi Smyth, Gilbert Walker, Joanne Simpson, Henry Stommel, and Willi Dansgaard. Her meticulous research sets them in their political and social contexts, and in relation to others whose names might be more familiar to most of us. In my view, she does this most successfully with Simpson, whose personal archive was explicitly intended to enable this: ‘she hoped that a time would come when the so-called work/life balance was no longer seen to be a problem only for women, but for all working people’.

John Tyndall (photograph by Lock & Whitfield. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International, CC BY 4.0)

Dry also uncovers the paradoxes of shifting politics, economics, and beliefs that enabled and complicated, deliberately or accidentally, the insights of her characters. From mountain climber and loner Tyndall (investigating the movement of European ice sheets) to Walker (tasked with predicting the Indian monsoon), the needs of the British Empire financed geological and meteorological exploration – how can the Indian harvest be secured; how can British ships be kept safe at sea; does the Northwest Passage exist? (Ironically, it increasingly does now, due to thinning ice.) Dansgaard’s access to the mile-long, 100,000-year-old ice core drilled in great secrecy in Greenland in 1964 is an outcome of Cold War paranoia – only the US military could afford such an extraordinary enterprise. Simpson’s remarkable career was enabled partly because, at the age of twenty-one, she was recruited to teach meteorology to World War II US air force cadets, an opportunity that outside wartime would not have been offered to a woman.

One of the lessons for me was the significance of the outsider vision. Many of these people suffered disappointment in their lives: Smyth was eventually completely alienated from the scientific establishment; his contemporary Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who had captained Darwin’s ship the HMS Beagle and became the first head of the first British Meteorological Department, committed suicide; Walker had a nervous breakdown; Simpson faced sexism and bigotry. But each of these people, sometimes because of their outsider status, uniquely imagined and researched critical insights that contributed to both the poetry and science of our contemporary understandings of the planet. In a number of places, Dry also reminds us of the relationship between the veracity of ‘vernacular’ knowledges built over epic timeframes and the new predictive knowledges of modern science. The deep-weather knowledge of experienced sailors, the multi-generational knowledge of Indian farmers, the observations of shepherds on European glaciers, all fed into the new science (one absence here is any reference to Indigenous knowledges).

I am reasonably conversant in the broad history of science for these issues, but Waters of the World opened a whole other landscape. Connections embrace Kurt Vonnegut (his brother discovered the use of silver iodide for cloud seeding, and inspired events in Cat’s Cradle); the iconic 1970s publication Whole Earth Catalog (its founder Stewart Brand lobbied to make the Blue Marble image public); and Jorge Luis Borges and the dream of the perfect map (now digitally reimagined with a one-to-one correspondence in the ‘General Circulation Model’ of the dynamics of the Earth system).

Dry’s writing is both powerful and poetic, and very quotable: ‘the distance between visionary dreams and inadvertent consequences was shorter than most imagined’; ‘to use the past not as a cheat sheet for future events but as an exercise in imaginative stretching’; ‘there was in the end, nothing to do but wonder, and keep looking’. The narrative structure is effective and highly readable; there is an extensive index and a useful bibliographic essay that explains and significantly expands the references.

As Dry points out, since the late nineteenth century most scientists have stopped writing for a general public; they now overwhelmingly publish in hard-to-access and alienating scientific journals. At a time of political ecological brinksmanship, Dry’s project is to make at least some of this accessible. These ‘stories of water’ lay out an impressive picture of both what is left out, and what is brought in, to our modern understandings of climate science.