Free Sample
Deep Water
The Hidden History of the Ocean's Unseen Frontiers
by Rebecca Stern
Chapter 1: The Blue Frontier
The first thing you need to know about the deep ocean is that it is not a place you can imagine. Your mind will betray you, filling the void with the familiar tropes of a nighttime forest or a starless sky, but those analogies are too kind. The deep ocean is a realm of absolute and unrelenting darkness, a world where the pressure would crush a submarine like a paper cup, and where the temperature hovers just above freezing, a constant, indifferent cold. It is a place so alien that the organisms that live there might as well be from another planet. Yet this is not a distant world; it is our own. It is the very foundation of the planet we inhabit, and we have barely begun to understand it.
Consider the scale of our ignorance. We have charted the surfaces of Venus and Mars to a resolution of meters, mapping every major canyon and volcanic peak on our neighboring worlds. In contrast, the vast majority of our own planet’s seafloor remains unmapped at a useful resolution. We have better topographical data for the red planet than we do for the 70% of Earth that is covered by water. This is not a metaphor. It is a statistical fact. The deep sea—defined as the region below 200 meters, where sunlight fades to nothing—is the largest habitat on Earth, encompassing more living space than all of the planet's forests, grasslands, and deserts combined. It is