Gillen D’Arcy Wood Princeton Univ. Press (2025) Similar to the global voyage of naturalist Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s, HMS Challenger’s 1872–76 oceanographic expedition left a vast scientific legacy — although one less familiar than its predecessor’s. The HMS Challenger’s crew members are “long gone, but the ship’s imprint is still on the world’s oceans”, concludes Gillen D’Arcy Wood, an environmental historian. Wood’s book revives the importance of the expedition’s “floating marine laboratory” and reveals its relevance to the challenges the oceans face today. Melissa Charenko Univ. Chicago Press (2025) “Climate defies easy definition,” writes historian Melissa Charenko in her complex yet accessible book on the scientific study of the climate during the twentieth century. This research relied on climate proxies, which fall into two types. Physical proxies include fossilized pollen, tree rings and stalagmites.…