The Brilliant Abyss: Exploring the Majestic Hidden Life of the Deep Ocean, and the Looming Threat That Imperils It

"This book is wonderful. As you can see, I’ve read it very thoroughly—there are a million Post-it notes all through it. Helen Scales is a trained marine biologist, writer, and public broadcaster. She is an extraordinary writer who can unpack very complex ocean science and make it fascinating and digestible for the average person. The Brilliant Abyss is a deep dive into the extraordinary life and the seafloor features that we’re finding in the deep sea and all the potential discoveries that accompany them. At the same time, it’s about the growing threats to the deep sea, including deep sea fishing and deep sea mining. These forces are converging on the deep sea, which is the world’s largest wilderness refuge in the world. It makes sense that all these industrial forces want to extract from and exploit it. Scales writes about the beauty of the deep sea and the threats to it. It’s definitely a new frontier. We’ve mapped only about 25 percent of the seafloor. The Moon and Mars have been completely mapped, but we don’t have a base map for our planet yet. That seems crazy. While writing my book, I kept track of all the extraordinary discoveries taking place during those few years. New islands popped out of the sea, due to shifting tectonic plates. In the depths of the ocean, new animals were discovered, and animals were witnessed swimming in deeper waters where they had never been seen before. New things are coming out all the time. It’s one of those rare scientific fields where you can still make basic discoveries—mind-blowing discoveries—and they even happen accidentally. The ocean is a hard place to work. It’s so vast and so deep. It covers 71 percent of the planet. On average, it’s two and a half miles deep, so you have to travel a long way down to study animals on the seafloor. It’s a hostile work environment, due to the wind and the waves. And it’s incredibly expensive to work out there. All these factors contribute to making it a more difficult place to study. At the same time, we have some ocean blindness around this frontier. Because it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. We see only the ocean’s surface; we’re not predisposed to explore beneath it. It’s naturally elusive and mysterious."