LONDON The £10,000 Aventis Prize for Science Books — sometimes called science's Booker Prize — has this year been won by Robert Kunzig's Mapping the Deep – The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science.

The book not only investigates the role of ocean currents in influencing the global climate but also describes in vivid detail the lives of jellyfish, siphonophores, salps and other remarkable organisms that occupy this last, great unexplored environment.

Kunzig (the European Editor of Discover magazine) is based in Dijon, France and has won numerous other prestigious writing prizes including the AAAS-Westinghouse Science Journalism Award, presented by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The prize for Children's Science Book of the Year went to Michael Allaby for the DK Guide to Weather.

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