May

21

Book ‘Em: The Other Final Frontier.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 21, 2007 |

Don’t forget to enter the Just Write Summer Reading Contest!

The Deep
Edited by Claire Nouvian
(University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Only a small number of people will ever be lucky enough to travel to the very deepest parts of the ocean. Tourists to the Grand Cayman Islands can descend to as much as 1000 feet, but the ocean is much, much deeper than that. The bathyscaphe Trieste, crewed by U.S. Navy Lieutenant Don Walsh and engineer Jacques Piccard, traveled to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, reaching a depth of more than 35,800 feet in 1960, but deep-sea diving is still expensive and dangerous.

For those of us who would like to see the depths but will never get there, there are a lot of documentaries but even the best documentary can leave you saying, “What was that? Can you tell me more?” And there are very few books, at least for laypeople, about the ocean depths. Fortunately we now have The Deep, edited by journalist, film director, and producer Claire Nouvian. The book has chapters on various biospheres and animals of the deep as well as gorgeous, full-color photographs of some of the weirdest animals you’ll ever see. (Check out the gallery at the book’s web site for just a taste of what the book itself offers.) Still largely unexplored, the deepest parts of the ocean harbor both some of the harshest environments on the planet as well as possibly the greatest diversity of life. And this is in spite of the fact that, as the book explains, plants don’t grow below 200 meters (656 feet). Plants rule terrestrial rainforests, but in the abyss it’s animals who are supreme.

The book’s only weakness is the occasional computer-generated picture, because these don’t compare to the more than 200 spectacular pictures of real animals, including several of Vampyroteuthis infernalis (the “vampire squid from Hell”), and many of animals that have been photographed for the first time. The fact that some are simply listed as “unidentified species” is a poignant reminder of how much more we have to learn about the largest part of our planet.


Comments

2 Comments so far

  1. Angel on May 21, 2007 9:54 am

    Nice review, Chris. My thought when looking through the book was that sci-fi writers would now have another resource for thinking about what creatures on other worlds might look like.

  2. John on May 21, 2007 11:52 am

    We sent people that deep!? I had no idea. I always imagined a trip like that killing people. Now you have got me thinking what kind of sub did this. Thank you for making me think. This reminds me of that Tsunami a few years ago. People were finding all sorts of odd fish that normally remain at the bottom that got sucked up and dumped onto dry land.

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