The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea. - Brief Article - Review - book review

Sierra, Jan, 2000 by Jennifer Hattam

The Universe Below: Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea by William J. Broad; Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $15

More than 700 people have traveled into space since Vostok I launched cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961. Yet no one has ventured the mere seven miles down to the ocean floor's deepest point, Challenger Deep, near the Mariana Islands in the Pacific. The great ocean trenches remain unexplored--and, like the rest of the deep-sea ecosystem, largely unknown, says New York Times science writer William J. Broad as he guides us through Earth's "last great wilderness," immersing us in an alien world of biological riches. "The daylight outside my viewing port slowly began to fade. Before long I was transfixed by an endless procession of gelatinous creatures. Ripples of light would pass along the bodies of the larger ones as we swept past. Smaller ones would explode in a luminescent flash," writes Broad, who ventured into the deep aboard Alvin, a seven-foot titanium submersible.

Sixteenth-century Spanish treasure ships lie untouched in the Azores. In Atlantic waters southeast of Newfoundland, the ghostly carcass of the Titanic rests two and a half miles down, artifacts of another time spilling from its torn hull. Animals with dozens of stomachs, glowing fish, and prehistoric species swim, glide, and undulate by. An undersea chimney dubbed "Godzilla" towers 15 stories high, gushing mineral-rich hot water into the icy darkness of the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Seattle.

Broad vividly describes, then looks past these oddities to examine what the deep sea can tell us about the rest of our world--and the nature of life itself. If microbes can thrive in the acidic, sulfuric, 235-degree-Fahrenheit heat of undersea volcanic vents, why not in the hostile climates and atmospheres of other planets?

But the very mysteries that lure explorers ever deeper make the ocean vulnerable to human intervention--undersea mining, saturation fishing, and 45 years of radioactive-waste disposal. We have only the sketchiest understandings of the deep sea's structure, Broad says, "much less of the alterations being made by deep fishing and planetary heating and the seventy thousand or so synthetic chemicals that we have managed to inject into the global environment. By any measure, our ignorance is almost as boundless as the deep." Broad urges us to stop exploiting the sea long enough to understand it, lest its mysteries become lost to us forever.