Is the deep ocean grander than outer space? , peppermint

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

Sing like a fish: how sound controls underwater life. By Amorina Kingdon. Crown; 336 pages; $30. Accountant; £16.99

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

More is known about the surface of Mars than about the ocean floor. According to one calculation, America spends 150 times more on space exploration than on ocean research. Scientists have mapped almost every crater on Mars, but only about 20% of the ocean floor. Yet interest in the ocean is growing. A trio of new books dive deeper. They travel through the bioluminescent zone of the twilight zone (between 200–1,000 m) into the murky depths of the midnight zone (1,000–4,000 m).

Suzanne Casey, a Canadian author, ventures even deeper. In “The Underworld” she describes her visit to an underwater volcano off the coast of Hawaii in 2021 with Victor Vescovo, an explorer. When the deep-sea submarine stood at a depth of 5,017 meters, it found a world of “dull beauty”. On the “light golden” sea floor were obsidian rocks with “neon-orange spots” and sea cucumbers grazing “like little translucent-violet cows”. Mr Vescovo has previously explored the deepest part of the Mariana Trench (about 11,000 meters down), where the water pressure is so high it feels as if 50 jumbo jets are held above you.

Ms. Casey’s book flits between a description of the depths and a history of ocean exploration. Scientists in the 19th century believed the abyss to be “azoic”, or lifeless. Then the HMS Challenger collected all kinds of alien creatures during its voyage around the world in the 1870s. About 60 years later, William Beebe, an American naturalist, explored the Atlantic Ocean in a submarine and saw such strange animals.

Oceanography flourished for much of the 20th century, popularized by explorers such as Jacques Cousteau, who wrote that the depth was a “silent world”. In fact, it is remarkably noisy. Science writer Amorina Kingdon’s “Sing Like Fish” is not as entertaining as Ms. Casey’s book, but it compiles remarkable facts about ocean noises. 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 the fish are so noisy that they can be heard even above the water. In the 1980s, houseboat owners in Sausalito, California thought a secret military experiment was causing the loud noise. That sound was actually the mating call of the male toadfish. Marine animals can be heard droning, but humans also make a lot of noise in the ocean with industrial shipping and other activities.

Although these books are rich in facts, both authors agree that humans have barely scratched the surface of oceanic exploration. To depict the untold grandeur of the underworld, Ms. Casey uses imaginative, even literary language. She describes the sea as a “haunted basement” filled with “pulsating lights and fantastical shapes”. This is the way the famous American novelist Richard Powers reveals the depth in his new novel “Playground”. The abyss, he writes, is teeming with “primitive life”; The creatures look as if they have been “left behind from the oldest back alleys of evolution”.

“Playground” tells the story of a beach mission off the coast of Makatea in French Polynesia. Mr. Powers uses the atoll to present four distinct narratives, reminiscent of “The Overstory,” his Pulitzer-Prize-winning epic about trees. Although the book gets lost in the whirlpool of big ideas, from immortality to artificial intelligence, it captures the majesty of depth. The most interesting character, Evelyn Beaulieu, based on Sylvia Earle, one of the first female aquanauts, leads a mesmerizing dive. Waves of lyrical description spread across the lines as she is “surrounded by the wildest variety” of sea creatures. The novel takes readers into a world that is as fascinating as it is forbidden.

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