It may one day become known as the biggest story ever told.

For nine years, 2,000 scientists from 82 countries have spent $600 million trying to answer three huge questions about the world’s oceans.

What once lived in the oceans?

What is living in them now?

What will be there in the future?

A final report will be published a year from now. But the preliminary findings are staggering. The census found that:

• Life exists virtually everywhere in the oceans, even in places where people thought that nothing could live. More than 5,300 new species were found since the census started nine years ago.

• Over the past 50 years however, the numbers of large predators, such as tuna and swordfish, have fallen by 90 percent.

• In that same time, one-quarter of the world’s coral reefs have died due to pollution and there are more than 400 dead zones around the world covering 98,000 square miles.

The story of the unprecedented census is told in “World Ocean Census: A Global Survey of Marine Life,” a new book by three writers associated with the University of Rhode Island.

The authors are: Darlene Trew Crist, a science writer based in North Kingstown; Gail Scowcroft, of Narragansett, the associate director of URI’s Office of Marine Programs and executive director of the National Centers for Ocean Science Education Excellence; and James Harding, of South Kingstown, who was a marine scientist at URI and now works for the Rhode Island National Guard.

URI’s Office of Marine Programs, headed by Sara Hickox, provided education and outreach services for the census, which was done by research teams working all over the world.

The book is filled with more than 250 brilliantly colored photographs of life forms most people have probably never seen. Its chapters take readers through the workings of the census and its findings. The work also provides a readily accessible synopsis of the vast resources available at the census Web site, www.coml.org.

The census teams plan to publish three books about their work and National Geographic is doing a documentary.

The locally produced book came about, Crist said, because the publisher of Firefly Books Ltd. was interested in the census and offered to publish a book telling its story.

“For Gail, Jim and I, it was an honor to write the book,” Crist said. “It tells the story of a wonderful scientific collaboration. It’s been fun and I feel very lucky to be part of it.”

Crist said she thinks the book would be useful for teachers, students, scientists and anyone interested in the oceans.

“We wrote this in just one and a half years, so this is fresh science,” added Scowcroft. “We’ve taken scientific discoveries and digested them in a way that hopefully the public can engage in.”

Scowcroft said the project was an interesting writing collaboration. She is a scientist who works with climate change, Crist is a science writer and Harding is a marine biologist. All three specialties were brought to bear, Scowcroft said, as the three wrote their chapters and then edited each other’s work.

For its historic view of the oceans, scientists and marine historians looked at the last 500 years and utilized resources ranging from whalers’ logs to Russian monastery records.

The research found that in some places humans depleted fish stocks much earlier than previously thought. For instance, thousands of blue fin tuna used to migrate into the waters of northern Europe every year in the early part of the last century. By the 1940s, Norwegians manned more than 200 boats that landed thousands of tons of tuna. By the 1960s, tuna were gone from northern Europe.

To discover what is in the oceans now, scientists employed icebreaking vessels, manned and unmanned submersibles as well as deep-towed vehicles pulled behind research vessels. By tagging fish and mammals, they found biological “hot spots” in the oceans. The scientists also found new species of squid, jellyfish and crustaceans.

In looking to the future, the book quotes some scientists predicting that climate change and human-induced habitat degradation could drive half the species on earth into extinction in the next 100 years. But the study also cites examples of strong conservation efforts bringing back such species as haddock, yellowtail and scallops.

Final results of the census are scheduled to be unveiled in a news conference Oct. 24, 2010, in London.

Enric Sala, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a member of the Census of Marine Life Steering Committee, is giving the annual Charles and Marie Fish Lecture in Oceanography at noon Friday at the University of Rhode Island’s Bay Campus. His presentation on his expeditions to remote, pristine reefs is entitled: “The Search for the Last Virgin Coral Reefs.” Before and after Crist will be available to sign copies of “World Ocean Census.”

plord@projo.com