Is the deep ocean more magnificent than outer space? | Mint

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean. By Susan Casey. Doubleday; 352 pages; $32. Penguin; £10.99

Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water. By Amorina Kingdon. Crown; 336 pages; $30. Scribe; £16.99

Playground. By Richard Powers. W.W. Norton; 400 pages; $29.99. Hutchinson Heinemann; £20

More is known about the surface of Mars than the floor of the ocean. By one count America spends 150 times more on space exploration than ocean research. Scientists have mapped almost every Martian crater but only about 20% of the seabed. Yet interest in the ocean is growing. A trio of new books plunges into the deep. They journey through the bioluminescent realm of the twilight zone (between 200-1,000 metres) and into the murky depths of the midnight zone (1,000-4,000 metres).

Susan Casey, a Canadian writer, ventures even further into the abyss. In “The Underworld” she describes her trip to an underwater volcano off the coast of Hawaii in 2021, alongside Victor Vescovo, an explorer. When the deep-sea submersible parked 5,017 metres down, she found a world of “languid beauty”. On the “pale gold” seabed were obsidian rocks with “patches of neon-orange” and sea cucumbers grazing “like tiny translucent-purple cows”. Mr Vescovo has previously explored the deepest part of the Mariana Trench (nearly 11,000 metres down), where the water pressure is so high it feels like 50 jumbo jets stacked on top of you.

Ms Casey’s book flows between descriptions of the deep and the history of ocean exploration. In the 19th century scientists believed the abyss was “azoic”, or lifeless. Then the HMS Challenger dredged up all manner of exotic creatures on its trip around the world in the 1870s. Around 60 years later William Beebe, an American naturalist, explored the Atlantic ocean in a submersible and saw such strange beasts for himself.

For much of the 20th century oceanography flourished, popularised by explorers such as Jacques Cousteau, who wrote that the deep was a “silent world”. In truth it is remarkably noisy. “Sing Like Fish”, by Amorina Kingdon, a science writer, is not as engrossing as Ms Casey’s book, but it compiles remarkable facts about ocean noise. Readers learn that sound travels four and a half times faster underwater than on land, and that fish have the greatest variety of sound-producing organs of any vertebrate group.

Sometimes fish are so noisy that they are heard above water. In the 1980s houseboat owners in Sausalito, California, thought a loud hum was being produced by a secret military experiment. In reality the sound was the mating call of a male toadfish. Marine animals can be heard droning, but humans also make plenty of noise in the ocean with industrial shipping and other pursuits.

Though these books are awash with facts, both authors agree that humans have barely skimmed the surface of sea exploration. To conjure the untold magnificence of the underworld, Ms Casey uses imaginative, even literary, language. She describes the ocean as a “haunted basement” filled with “pulsing lights and phantasmagoric shapes”. This is similar to how Richard Powers, a celebrated American novelist, evokes the deep in “Playground”, his new novel. The abyss brims with “primordial life”, he writes; creatures look as if they were “left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys”.

“Playground” tells the story of a seasteading mission off the coast of Makatea in French Polynesia. Mr Powers uses the atoll to anchor four separate narratives in a style reminiscent of “The Overstory”, his Pulitzer-prizewinning epic about trees. Although the book gets lost in a whirlpool of big ideas, from immortality to artificial intelligence, it captures the majesty of the deep. The most interesting character, Evelyne Beaulieu, based on Sylvia Earle, one of the first female aquanauts, embarks on mesmerising dives. Waves of lyrical description spill over lines as she is “swarmed by the wildest assortment” of sea creatures. The novel transports readers to a world as fascinating as it is forbidding.

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