The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

Seven miles of ocean above your head, eight tons of pressure per square inch trying its best to end you, a robotic arm stabbing at your face—and the only thing holding it all back is a thin skin of titanium that was built according to your calculations? That’s not an ordinary day at the office. That’s a tad more intense than giving a PowerPoint pre

The Limiting Factor doesn’t conquer—it submits. It allows access to the hadal zone, but only on Hades’s overwhelming terms. No matter who is piloting the sub, the ocean is always in the driver’s seat.

In the deep, humanity can’t even pretend to be in charge. Of course we’re not in charge of space, either, but exploring upward gives us the illusion of expansion, as though we’re conquering territory, extending our ever-acquisitive reach. In this mindset, to go inward, into the abyss, is to be stuck with what we already have.

At dusk, I would sneak in with a flashlight and drop bits of food in the water, hoping to coax them to the surface. Most of the time there were no takers. Then one day I tossed in a scrap of hot dog and a great beast of a fish—it had to be four feet long—emerged from under the dock, raised its head, and lunged at the meat before quickly retreating.

Even with the latest low-light cameras, Taylor said, this communion was impossible to film. It was too evanescent, too delicate—too inextricable from its realm and the instant in which it happened. If you tried to capture it, you’d miss it. Only by being part of the greeting could you experience it, because it was more about energy than form. We we

Even now, when every last crater on the moon has been named and interactive three-dimensional maps of Mars can be viewed on an iPhone, 80 percent of the seafloor has never been charted in any kind of sharp detail. Yet the deep ocean—defined as the waters below six hundred feet—covers 65 percent of the earth’s surface and occupies 95 percent of its

Problem is, in the deep you need money to get at the history. As awful as Odyssey’s behavior was—and there was nothing archaeological about how it treated the site—there would’ve been no coins to argue about if the company hadn’t spent millions to find them. So if the goal is to become better acquainted with our submerged cultural heritage, too oft

But the inaccessibility of the deep, I thought, made it even more alluring. Others wanted to visit Paris, Bora Bora, the Serengeti: I wanted to go into the ocean’s abyss. The idea of an unknown aquatic realm, ever present below us but invisible unless we look for it—an underworld, within our world—had always worked a sort of spell on me, an alchemi

Now it’s apparent that nature runs as a massively interconnected system, with the deep sea as its motherboard. Yet even as we tinker with the machinery in potentially irreversible ways, we have only the foggiest notion of how it all works.

But a katabasis is never a wasted journey: it always offers a dose of the phenomenal. According to the news article that caught my eye, this one was no exception. The maps revealed that the Southern Indian Ocean seafloor was spectacularly, eerily beautiful. It was a symphony of extremes, a playlist of geology’s greatest hits. It was as if we had di