Nonfiction<\/h3>\nExploring, and Exploiting, the Ocean\u2019s Depths<\/h2>\n
A new history of the deep sea\u2014and the forces that threaten it<\/p>\n
The Underworld: <\/strong>Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean<\/a> The first bathysphere made its initial descent off an island in Bermuda on June 6, 1930, lowered into the Atlantic Ocean by a shipboard winch. The vessel was a crude metal sphere pocked with tiny quartz windows, akin to finger holes in a bowling ball. The plunge was terrifying: leaks could spring, air could dwindle, portholes could collapse. A broken cable would send the bathysphere plummeting into oblivion.<\/p>\n Yet the people inside it\u2014naturalist William Beebe and engineer Otis Barton\u2014were as enchanted as they were frightened. The vividness of the blue light transcended language: \u201cmore like an emotion than a color,\u201d writes Susan Casey in The Underworld<\/em>, her entertaining account of the technologies and scientists who have shaped deep-sea exploration. The deep was a realm both inhospitable and lively, a place where fear and awe coexisted\u2014 \u201can ungovernable territory,\u201d as Casey puts it, \u201cthat begins where the sunlight stops.\u201d<\/p>\n Nearly a century after the bathysphere’s voyage, it’s often said that we know more about deep space than about the depths of our own planet. We’ve named practically every large moon crater yet thoroughly charted just 25 percent of the seafloor. The ocean isn’t less accessible than space; we simply haven’t prioritized it. For every dollar the federal government shells out on ocean exploration, it gives hundreds to NASA. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carriers but not one submersible capable of accessing the ocean’s deepest spots.<\/p>\n Casey posits that the roots of humanity’s aversion run, well, deep. Venturing into space offers \u201cthe illusion of expansion\u201d into a limitless cosmos, whereas our ocean sloshes across a planet we feel we’ve already conquered. It’s also just plain creepy. The deep sea is Earth’s \u201chaunted basement\u2014sinister, shrouded in blackness, spewing molten rock and poisonous gases, a den of freaky beings and hoary specters.\u201d<\/p>\n Happily, not everyone harbors such antibenthic prejudice. This is Casey’s fourth marine-themed book. In The Wave<\/em> (2010), she chases gargantuan swells that swallow ships and enrapture surfers; other books sent her in pursuit of dolphins and great white sharks. Those works, however, were set entirely in the ocean’s upper strata; meanwhile the deep sea\u2014everything below 650 feet\u2014constitutes 95 percent of Earth’s habitable space.<\/p>\n In The Underworld<\/em>, Casey introduces a cast of explorers who have unraveled oceanic mysteries over the past two centuries. First came the dredgers, the scientists who dragged giant shovels behind sailing ships and picked through the biological rubble. Most notable among them was Charles Wyville Thomson, a Scotsman who in the 1860s hauled up glass sponges, sea spiders, and other curiosities\u2014thus debunking a theory that the deep ocean was lifeless. Later came Beebe and other pilots, who took unproven crafts to pressurized depths.<\/p>\n Although none of Casey’s personae dramatis<\/em> have Neil Armstrong’s name recognition, their journeys have taught us much about how Earth functions. The study of hydrothermal vents has revealed wondrous ecosystems, powered by hydrogen sulfide rather than light, that may hint at life’s origins. The investigation of crustal spreading and subduction zones has unveiled the movements of tectonic plates and offered insight into the genesis of dangerous earthquakes. Far from being barren and dull, Casey declares, \u201cthe deep is the red-hot center of creation.\u201d<\/p>\n Casey isn’t the first author to fixate on the deep. In 2021 Below the Edge of Darkness and The Brilliant Abyss<\/em>, by biologists Edith Widder and Helen Scales, respectively, covered similar territory. Widder focused largely on bioluminescence, the \u201cliving light\u201d that creatures deploy to feed, find mates and deter enemies, whereas Scales concentrated on commercial fishing and other industries that imperil deep-sea ecosystems.<\/p>\n In contrast to those writers, who regard the deep with unadulterated awe, Casey spikes her reverence with levity: one citadel of hydrothermal chimneys reminds her of \u201cGaud\u00ed on an acid trip.\u201d Although there is no shortage of biological wonders in The Underworld<\/em>, its author seems most fascinated by how humans have explored a place so hostile to them. This is a book about vampire squid, yes, but also about the technologies that have revealed these creatures, such as sonar platforms and manipulator arms.<\/p>\n And the mechanics of exploration are changing fast. As with space\u2014increasingly a playground for the likes of Bezos, Branson and Musk\u2014the ocean has become the habitat of the ultrawealthy. Casey shadows the Five Deeps expedition, the brainchild of Victor Vescovo, a private equity investor and former navy officer who reminds even his friends of a Bond villain. In 2019 Vescovo became the first person to visit the deepest point in all five ocean basins, a feat he completed in a custom-built submersible\u2014dubbed the Limiting Factor<\/em> in homage to a spaceship in Iain M. Banks’s science fiction\u2014that resembles a \u201cpadded briefcase\u201d or a \u201cchubby alien’s face.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether you consider Five Deeps a heroic act of derring-do or a sad testament to how poorly the federal government funds ocean research is perhaps a matter of personal taste. Although the Five Deeps was certainly not without scientific value\u2014Vescovo invited biologists, geologists, and other academics, who documented new species and donated maps to the United Nations\u2014its whiff of machismo and its leader’s insistence on doing many dives solo rankled some observers. On Twitter, Julie Huber, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, lamented<\/a> Vescovo’s \u201clittle technical expertise & general disregard for safety.\u201d<\/p>\n Vescovo’s conversations with Casey won’t dispel a reader’s suspicion that he’s fueled by ego: \u201cI can do whatever I want … I’m having a blast!\u201d Vescovo tells the writer when they meet aboard his ship en route to the Tonga Trench. Although Casey pays lip service to Vescovo’s critics, The Underworld<\/em> would have benefited from a more thorough examination of ocean exploration’s politics and power dynamics. In the 21st century, must our most celebrated adventurers remain impossibly rich white guys?<\/p>\n The vainglorious financiers will soon have company\u2014namely, deep-sea mining companies seeking to capitalize on society’s surging demand for electric vehicles and other ostensibly \u201cgreen\u201d technologies. The abyssal plains are strewn with mineral nodules that coalesce around biotic seeds such as sharks’ teeth, accumulating cobalt and other metals integral to lithium-ion batteries. Per one mining executive, these troves \u201cliterally lie on the ocean floor like golf balls,\u201d but acquiring them won’t be a benign process. After companies grind up the nodules (and the creatures that adhere to them), Casey explains in one chapter, \u201cthe remains will be fire-hosed back into the deep,\u201d forming a sediment plume that may smother sensitive life. It’s a timely warning: the International Seabed Authority was given until July 2023 to craft the rules that will regulate the nascent industry.<\/p>\n Mining’s potential impacts are all the more alarming given how little we know about what we stand to lose. The deep sea’s cryptic menagerie features everything from charismatic megafauna such as sixgill sharks to sprawling mats of chemosynthetic bacteria. Casey excels at conjuring the \u201cmarvelous weirdos\u201d that glide through submersibles’ beams. Dragonfish have \u201cluminous barbels swinging from their chins\u201d; a Pacific sleeper shark possesses \u201ca body as brindled as old granite.\u201d The deep sea remains, for now, the planet’s grandest wildlife preserve.<\/p>\n At The Underworld’<\/em>s climax, Casey finally tours this sanctuary herself when she and Vescovo plummet more than 16,000 feet to the base of a Hawaiian volcano. Like Beebe in his bathysphere, Casey is captivated, and she ably describes the scene for so many of us who will never experience it: \u201cEverything shimmered with a languid beauty, an uncanny gentleness, an amniotic calm.\u201d<\/p>\n Although shrimp and jellies abound, Casey is most struck by what she doesn’t<\/em> find, chiefly those elements that we feeble surface dwellers consider intrinsic to life. There’s no light, no air, no weather, no time. Yet there’s a more profound absence, too: an absence of control, of human supremacy, of ego (save, perhaps, for the centimillionaire in the pilot’s chair). The deep, Casey writes, is where \u201cyou lose your bearings and you find yourself.\u201d\u00a0\u2014Ben Goldfarb<\/em><\/p>\n Ben Goldfarb<\/strong> is author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter<\/em> (Chelsea Green, 2018) and Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet<\/em> (W. W. Norton, forthcoming in September 2023).<\/p>\n You can find many truths through creative problem-solving<\/p>\n Is Math Real? <\/strong>How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths<\/a> You’re likely to identify as either \u201ca math person\u201d or \u201cnot a math person,\u201d a decisive label you probably received as a child based on your experiences (and grades) in school. Society’s persistent assignment of people into\u2014or exclusion of them from\u2014the artificial category of \u201cmath person\u201d is the constant worry of mathematician and author Eugenia Cheng, whose latest book attempts to show that math isn’t about tedious rigidity that’s accessible only to certain people. Rather it’s about \u201cincreasingly nuanced worlds in which we can explore different things being true.\u201d<\/p>\n Cheng narrates in a gently instructive first-person voice, inviting readers back into the world of mathematics. In individual chapters, subsections explain the many ways to approach an introductory topic such as multiplication. By walking us through five creative ways to solve 6 \u00d7 8, for example, Cheng successfully demonstrates that \u201chaving different ways to think about something constitutes a deeper understanding.\u201d Eventually she leads us toward more abstract concepts such as the polar coordinate system, a graphical approach to defining a point using distance and angle, as well as irrational numbers and decimals that repeat infinitely. Despite the complexity of these latter ideas, her use of diagrams and figures helps to reinforce their approachability\u2014although in some cases their incommensurate simplicity feels unsatisfying.<\/p>\n Readers familiar with Cheng’s 2020 book X + Y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender<\/em> will be accustomed to her tendency to draw parallels between mathematical concepts and social issues. For instance, Cheng describes logarithmic and exponential trends to condemn the denial of COVID-19. She demonstrates how axis manipulation can visually distort infection trends and laments that \u201cfar too many people thought [scientists] were fearmongering.\u201d This deliberate choice to enter the political fray by injecting her opinions on white privilege, gender roles, \u201cthey\/them\u201d pronouns and fat shaming invites controversy\u2014and admiration for her conviction.<\/p>\n As the final chapters unfold, Cheng connects her beloved field of category theory\u2014an advanced branch of math that explores relations between objects\u2014with countless personal philosophies, literary references and historic events. Although these ambitious sections would have benefited from more explicit transitions, Cheng’s affable style carries her central message through to the end: \u201cYou didn’t fail math. Math failed you.\u201d \u2014Sam Miller<\/em><\/p>\n The interstellar stakes of self-identity<\/p>\n Translation State<\/strong><\/a> \u201cI had begun to think that maybe it would be nice to have a gender.\u201d So declares one of the three protagonists of Ann Leckie’s latest brain-bending, genre-crossing space opera. Leckie won nearly all of science fiction’s major awards for Ancillary Justice<\/em>, her 2013 novel about an \u201cancillary,\u201d a fragment of a spaceship’s artificial consciousness housed in and controlling a human body. It is seeking revenge against the ruler of the Radch Empire, whose own split consciousness is waging explosive war against itself. Translation State<\/em> stands as her richest, most surprising novel since that jewel.<\/p>\n Deeply concerned with what it means to choose one’s own identity, from gender to species, Leckie’s new book opens with three engaging narrative strands (chapters alternate among the perspectives). Two are relatively conventional in outline but surprising in their particulars: Enae, a shut-in caretaker, is motivated after her grandmother’s death to investigate a two-century-old cold case nobody expects her to crack, and space station worker Reet, who dreams occasionally of vivisection, learns of evidence that he might not have been born as human. That revelation, and Reet’s insistence that he’s certainly human now, sparks a gripping intergalactic legal drama in which all parties, from aliens to AIs, have complex competing agendas. Just as in our world, the identities individuals claim for themselves are perceived by some as threatening to the very foundations of society.<\/p>\n More immediately beguiling are the third protagonist’s chapters: dispatches from the upbringing of a truly alien mind, bred for mysterious purposes in a fascinating incubator-cum-schoolyard. It’s this character, Qven, who after meeting Reet becomes curious about the possibility of gender\u2014and discovers something like love (and the pleasures of binge-watching TV shows). The stakes of Reet’s case are both deeply personal and galaxy-shaking, as the outcome could shred the treaty that protects humanity from the mysterious and terrifying Presger, aliens known for \u201ceating\u201d and \u201ccopying\u201d the beings unfortunate enough to meet them.<\/p>\n This novel, though a stand-alone story, is the fifth set in the Ancillary Justice<\/em> universe, and readers new to Leckie may find it challenging to keep up with the unfamiliar pronouns, cultures, alien species and politics. Starting with the earlier titles is rewarding but not absolutely necessary because for all her dazzling speculative inventions, Leckie’s work is consistently inviting. Her true genre is uplifting, forward-thinking, character-driven science fiction: cozy page-turners attuned to diplomacy, tea drinking, alien minds and the urgent power of self-definition. \u2014Alan Scherstuhl<\/em><\/p>\n Lost Believers<\/strong><\/a> Deep in the Russian taiga, Agafia’s days revolve around coaxing survival from the land and practicing her faith free of the religious persecution that her parents fled. Her father’s choice to stay in the wilderness protects them from the sinful influences of the outside world\u2014until their lives are upended by an encounter with a geologist named Galina, who is surveying the area for a new mine. Author Irina Zhorov deftly explores the landscape of the two women’s lives and the choices they must make as their worlds converge, mapping the forces of faith and fate, progress and preservation onto the backdrop of 1970s Soviet life. \u2014Dana Dunham<\/em><\/p>\n
\nby Susan Casey
\nDoubleday, 2023 ($32)<\/p>\nIn Math, No Question Is Dumb<\/h2>\n
\nby Eugenia Cheng
\nBasic Books, 2023 ($30)<\/p>\nFiction<\/h3>\n
Alien Agendas<\/h2>\n
![\"Illustration](\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/sciam\/cache\/file\/E8D9FAE9-0FFF-4C93-BD289ACAFC9C1BA9_medium.jpg\")
\n<\/figure>\n
\nby Ann Leckie
\nOrbit, 2023 ($29)<\/p>\nIn Brief<\/h3>\n
\nby Irina Zhorov
\nScribner, 2023 ($28)<\/p>\n
![\"Book](\"https:\/\/static.scientificamerican.com\/sciam\/assets\/Image\/2023\/0723-bookCovers.jpg\")
<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n