Soviet Books in Oceanography

Summary

This review examines five Soviet oceanographic publications and the obstacles to their circulation in the United States, including difficult procurement, inadequate Western abstracting coverage, limited print runs, and language barriers. Manheim cautions that publication counts are misleading because Soviet collections of papers partly serve the role of journals. Chemistry of the Pacific Ocean assembles scattered hydrochemical data and includes sediment pore waters, although the series structure restricts interdisciplinary discussion. Radioecology of Marine Organisms draws extensively on international literature, but insufficiently critical data selection and poorly specified experimental conditions reduce its usefulness. Lisitsin’s Recent Sedimentation in the Bering Sea receives strong praise alongside criticism of its mineral identification and sediment chemistry, while Recent Sediments of the Seas and Oceans surveys a broad range of Soviet research. The reviewer particularly recommends the first volume of the Atlas of Antarctica (1966), praising its integration of international data through 1963, comprehensive source citations, cartographic production, and cautious treatment of sparsely documented regions.