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Jun 07, 2023

Why the ocean’s depths fascinate us — and what we find within them

Some years ago, I had the privilege of spending two months in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The ship was 150 feet long, the place a seven-day and seven-night journey southwest of Hawaii, the depth

Some years ago, I had the privilege of spending two months in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The ship was 150 feet long, the place a seven-day and seven-night journey southwest of Hawaii, the depth below us 18,000 feet. You might surmise there was nothing out there — certainly no other vessels, no land, no airplanes overhead and few birds, even. Only a vast stretch of sea and sky.

The water around us was gin clear in the palm of my hand, but with a depth of three miles, its totality was a glowing, rich blueness. Within that bath of lapis was a teeming second world. Flocks of fish with diaphanous wings gliding over the waves. Shiny porpoises gamboling at the bows. The black flukes of whales and their mighty spouts. A surfboard-size, prehistoric-looking mola floating on its side, basking in the sun. And hovering lazily alongside the ship, the ugliest and most beautiful fish of all: four-foot-long, blunt-headed torpedoes of shimmering dolphin fish, which the early-20th-century naturalist William Beebe preferred to call by their “Spanish name [dorado], because indeed the fish was ‘a vibrating sheet of pure gold.’”

Beebe was the first human to slip more than a few dozen feet beneath that wonderland, which covers 71 percent of the Earth’s surface and holds, by volume, 99 percent of its habitable space. He did so from a 4½-foot steel sphere with tiny port holes of thick quartz, lowered into the abyss on a cable for the first time in 1930. “The world outside the steel ball was blue, blue, and nothing else, slowly fading to black but still bright with a strange brightness Beebe could not put into words,” writes Brad Fox in his splendid, hypnotic ode to wonder and curiosity, “The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths.” “Blacker than blackest midnight yet brilliant,” said Beebe from the depths, dictating via telephone cord to his assistant and paramour, Gloria Hollister, who listened on the support vessel 1,050 feet above. As he emerged at the surface after that dive, he knew “something in him had permanently changed,” writes Fox. “The yellow of the sun, [Beebe] wrote, ‘can never hereafter be as wonderful as blue can be.’”

It was jarring to be immersed in “The Bathysphere Book” and Susan Casey’s very different “The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean,” as I was, when OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded somewhere along its 12,000-foot plunge. Fool’s errand that it was, both books in very different ways made it make sense by evoking what any offshore seaman knows: The pelagic world and the abyss below it are sirens, so wondrous and strange that the Titan’s passengers who perished in the ocean’s embrace suddenly didn’t seem quite so foolish after all.

“Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself?” wrote Herman Melville in “Moby-Dick.” We are drawn to the sea and frightened by it, and always have been. We intuit from some preternatural recollection that we are its creatures, having once emerged from it. Jonah was swallowed by the whale and spit forth, reborn, reawakened. Yet its depths, the seat of our imaginations and subconscious, aren’t for the faint of heart, a truth reflected in their scientific terms. The abyssal zone of 13,000 to 20,000 feet, from the Greek word for bottomless, a place of vertigo and loss. Below that, only one destination more mysterious and more feared: Hades, or the hadal zone, below 20,000 feet. One day on my Pacific voyage the captain allowed us to jump into the sea for a swim, and some couldn’t do it, which is, I’m told, a common feeling. The idea of being suspended in what seemed a bottomless void was just too unsettling, too vertiginous.

Indeed, writes Casey, “in an age before science … what people overwhelmingly believed about the deep was that it was filled with monsters. … Ships would leave and never come back. Mariners vanished into is maw, sinking into an underworld that was crawling with demons like Leviathan and the Kraken.” What really lurked in its deepest recesses, no one knew. Early efforts to excavate by dredge and net brought up gooey messes and odd creatures, but they were often disfigured, and exactly where they came from — the bottom or just caught in the equipment’s rise to the surface — was in dispute. And for many years, common wisdom held that below a certain depth, there was nothing at all. Just a cold, dark, hypoxic desert, whose ultimate depth remained a mystery.

The problem wasn’t so much breath but pressure. A single gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds, which means a crushing squeeze for anyone or anything that descends. At the lowest place on Earth, the 35,876-foot Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, that’s 16,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, or the equivalent, writes Casey, of “292 fully fueled 747s stacked on top of you.”

In the late 1920s a wealthy engineer named Otis Barton offered to design and fund a thick, one-piece steel ball for Beebe, on the condition that he got to operate the vessel, to which Beebe agreed. No doubt science would have been served by anyone traveling to a place no human had ever seen. But Beebe was not just anyone. Fifty-two by the time of his first dive off Bermuda, he was an autodidactic college dropout, a “bird scientist” and “protoecologist,” already famous, writes Fox, for “popular books describing trips around the world tracking pheasants, for an expedition up the Himalayas, and for risking his life to observe an erupting volcano on the Galapagos.” Dictating topside through the phone line to Hollister, and later speaking to various artists who drew from his words alone, he surfaced one of the great mysteries of the planet with wonder and lyricism. Far from an empty void, Beebe found a whole aquarium of creatures large and small, complex and simple, diaphanous and lighted from within in the abyssal darkness. Fish with tentacles emerging from their foreheads “culminating in a glowing ball at the tip.” Creatures that seemed to explode in flashes of light. A being that Beebe was never sure he’d actually seen that was, writes Fox, “a network of luminosity, delicate, with large meshes, all aglow and in motion, waving slowly as it drifted.” And throughout much of the long descent he would sometimes glimpse something massive and dark, just past the edges of his bathysphere’s beam.

This is no straightforward narrative but a book built from scraps that belie its intricate engineering. Some chapters are a few lines. Others range from Plato, to the nature of color, to DaVinci and Teddy Roosevelt and the island of Borneo, to Beebe’s raw, lyrical narration of what he saw below, which Fox arranges on the page like poetry. “Illumination is like brilliant / moon-light, purplish blue color.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s writing, Beebe or Fox. Mixed in its pages are original sketches and paintings from the expedition, a display of creatures every bit as strange as the kraken and the leviathan, though far less demonic.

If “The Bathysphere Book” is a kind of yearning dream, a tossing and turning in your bed in the night, “The Underworld” is what happens when you wake up: a sober, daytime, conventionally structured narrative about exploring the deep by manned submersible, made personal by Casey’s quest to descend to the depths herself. Casey notes that 52 years passed between the first visit to the Challenger Deep, by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in the Trieste in 1960, and the second, in 2012, by James Cameron in a custom-built one-man sub, a time during which hundreds flew to space, 200 to the International Space Station alone, at a cost of trillions. An absurdity, if you think about it, because the deep oceans are here, part of our planet, and filled with life, while the big, black void of rock and gas up there is infinitely further removed.

Much of “The Underworld” revolves around an American private-equity investor named Victor Vescovo. After summitting the highest peaks on every continent, skiing to the North and South poles, piloting his own jet and helicopter, and becoming “conversant in seven languages,” Vescovo gets the itch to visit the deepest points in each of the world’s five oceans. Doing so is no small matter — it requires not just the sub, but a large support vessel to launch and recover it, along with a small army of highly specialized technicians and scientists, all of which costs Vescovo $50 million or more. Although he eventually opens his sub and vessel to the broader scientific community, Vescovo’s real motivation is records — to be first to the deepest points of the planet. Why? “I realized that every day is precious,” he tells Casey, “and you may not get another one — best make full use of them.” Which is to say that, for all of Casey’s hours spent in Vescovo’s presence, he doesn’t articulate much beyond the platitudes spouted by your average neighborhood yoga teacher. It’s no coincidence that when Casey wants to get lyrical about the deep ocean, she quotes William Beebe.

But never mind. Vescovo’s egotism aside, “The Underworld” is a fine tour of the history and challenges of exploring this most fantastical and forbidding of earthen worlds. Its chapters about the coming “ecological mayhem” of undersea mining are frightening. It’s also a clear example that exploration isn’t just “curiosity acted upon,” as the submersible pioneer Walsh tells Casey. What counts isn’t simply going there but bringing that knowledge home for the rest of us in some compelling way. I suspect we’ll remember Beebe and his primitive sphere long after we’ve forgotten Vescovo’s records. Or perhaps it takes a man unhaunted by his inner demons to plunge so willingly to the hadal and back.

Carl Hoffman is the author of five books, including “Liar’s Circus,” “The Last Wild Men of Borneo” and “Savage Harvest.”

Effects of the Luminous Ocean Depths

By Brad Fox

Astra house. 336 pp. $29

Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

By Susan Casey

Doubleday. 330 pp. $32