Ocean Double Feature

This is a great book combo: Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine explains why planet Earth should really be called planet Ocean. Susan Casey’s The Underworld takes us on journeys to the deepest parts of this Ocean world, the places until very recently we knew almost nothing about.

A physicist and oceanographer, Czerski explains how the ocean works and how the “dynamic liquid powerhouse that stretches around our planet is connected to every part of our lives.” She breaks down the components of salinity, density, temperature, tides; shows how weather is an integral part of the ocean/atmosphere interaction; and explores the messengers, passengers, and voyagers of the seas; and breaks down the ocean’s biomass. Most of the planet’s biomass is found in the ocean. (You will have notices that “ocean” here is singular: we give parts of it different names but it’s all one body of water.)

Czerski rejects the oft-repeated line that we know more about the Moon than the deep ocean, arguing instead that “we absolutely know more about the deep ocean because there is more to know.” The Moon, after all, is just dead rock. It was once thought the deep ocean was lifeless; we certainly we know better now. (And lately, more people have now visited the deep sea than the Moon.)

And we know we’re royally fucking the ocean-planet system, which means, of course, our futures.

“If we continue to treat the ocean as an absence rather than a presence, and therefore an acceptable dumping ground for all sorts of stuff that we don’t want to think about, none of this will get better. […] But once we think of the ocean as a single integrated, intricate system, interwoven with our own lives, mediator of great flows of energy and materials around the planet, we have the perspective to really see what we’re doing to the blue machine.”

All of our poisons have made it to the depths, including mustard gas, radioactive materials, solvents, plastics, drugs…. Casey highlights the immanent threat of ocean-floor mining, which is nothing less than rape of the ocean floor. It turns out there are metal nodules, rich in rare minerals, that have slowly accreted over the millennia, like pearls; they’re the basis of an ocean-floor intricate ecosystem. Various cabals of greed-sickos, corrupt agencies, and pirate nations like Nauru want to scrape up and pulverize these rocks, extracting the maganese etc., then spewing the waste back into the sea. It’s like bottom trawling for fish, already biocide, only infinitely worse.

One of the problems is that hardly anyone has seen the ocean. Out of sight, out of mind. I don’t mean the top of the ocean, of course. Most have seen that, from shore, ship, or in air. Or even a globe: all the continents would fit into the Pacific, with room for another South America. Some people have dived and seen the sights in the shallows. But the great majority of the ocean? Where the sun does not reach? Where aliens, in a loose sense, dwell?*

Here’s where Casey comes in with her account of explorations of the deeps from HMS Challenger’s revolutionary voyage of 1872-1876 to today’s deep sea submersibles. These are crewed, remotely operated, and now even autonomously-run. It took 19 years for the Challenger Expedition to publish its 50 volumes of findings; things are a little quicker today, but they should get more attention. Don’t let the tech bro fantasies of interplanetary serfs drinking recycled urine in big gerbil tubes on Mars distract us from the more interesting, and vital, world below.

Another recent book, Brad Fox’s The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths has a more poetic-philosophical take on the deeps and centers on Beebe’s and Barton’s pioneering Bathysphere dives ninety years ago.

*In this sense: the discovery of the chemosynthesis-based ecosystems around hydrothermal vents were the first other worldly life forms we humans have come across. There are even bacteria down there that photosynthesize without sunlight, using the glow of the vents. We now have models for forms of life on the icy moons of the gas giants.