The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss

"After the massive, wordy tomes I’ve just mentioned it may come as a relief to turn to what is essentially a gorgeous coffee table book . Claire Nouvian’s The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss is a large format, full colour bestiary of the real, containing photographs of a couple of hundred among the countless astonishing creatures that live beneath the shallow sunlit layer at the top of the world ocean. There’s a cockatoo squid – a semi-transparent, orange-spotted, pig-snouted cephalopod with long, feathery tentacles above its eyes. There are predatory fish such as the black swallower, the gulper eel, the squarenose helmetfish and the scaly dragonfish, whose faces are – at first sight – stranger and more hideous than anything in your worst nightmares, though closer inspection reveals how remarkable and, in a way, beautiful they are. There are siphonophores, jellyfish, crinoids and other unaccountable beings such as the ping-pong tree sponge which would embarrass the most shameless creators of schlock science fiction. No one could have dreamed up these animals. The Deep , then, has marvelous pictures and a readable, informative text. Also, it illustrates very well at least two points that I think are central to this notion of growing up in the Anthropocene. The first is that the real world is stranger – more astonishing, more disturbing, more beautiful – than almost anything humans imagined. And we need to enlarge and deepen the boundaries of our imaginations and our knowledge to comprehend as great a part of the dimensions and details of the real world as possible. In this way we can extend our sense of what there is to celebrate, and what there is to value. Henry Thoreau said “in wildness is the salvation of the world.” He was a visionary and a radical but he was not a wooly thinker. It was Thoreau who refused to believe that Walden pond was bottomless and actually took the trouble to measure its depth with a plumb line. He saw that there was a greater beauty in knowing than in ignorance and that knowledge does not lessen the mystery of existence. The second point is that the fate of the world ocean, and the variety of life it contains, are to a great extent in our hands. This enormous habitat – 1.3 billion cubic kilometres or more – is nine-tenths of the living space on Earth. For all the brilliant scientific advances in recent decades, our understanding of what we are doing to it and what the likely consequences will be remain very patchy. Only very recently, for example, have we begun to appreciate that carbon dioxide emissions in the last few decades are altering ocean acidity faster than at any time in at least 55 million years, and probably tens or hundreds of times as fast as happened back then, at a time of crisis and extinction. Only very recently have we begun to understand just how much of the heat from the enhanced greenhouse effect caused by our pollution is sinking into the deep oceans. And then there are the impacts of over-fishing, pollution, plastics and much else. Books like The Deep are among the tools that can help us expand our sense of wonder while we also reflect on our responsibilities."