Book excerpt: Oceanography is the par excellence interdisciplinary science thanks to its peculiar setting within a fluid environment that makes connections extremely efficient. The oceans connections are well mirrored in the chapters of this book that share a quite explicit multidisciplinary and multi-environmental character. The book provides chapters on very different topics under very different settings, some with a focused angle, others with a broader approach, yet all sharing the idea that we need to understand the small pieces in order to put together the big picture for a much larger mechanism, the functioning of the ocean as a whole.