The Species That Doesn't Know So Much

Here's another argument for human humility, as well as a stab in the arrogance of those who say there's nothing left on earth to explore. There is. In fact, there is, oh, nine-tenths of the planet.

From a review of two new books (The Deep by Claire Novian, and The Silent Deep by Tony Koslow, both from U. of Chicago Press) about discoveries in the deep (really deep) blue sea, I learned the following:

"Only the uppermost part of the oceans—the top two hundred meters—bears any resemblance to the sunlit waters we are familiar with, yet below that zone lies the largest habitat on Earth. Ninety percent of all the ocean's water lies below two hundred meters, and its volume is eleven times greater than that of all of the land above the sea."

How deep is it? The Marianas Trench off the Phillipines goes down 11,000 meters. Just what does that mean? "Ships plying the waters over the trench glide as far above Earth's surface as do jet aircraft crossing the face of America."

Scientists know that "the most common backboned creature on our planet is a fish known as the benttooth bristlemouth, and it is only found in the deep sea." But we don't know a lot more--because less than one percent of the ocean deep has been mapped. By our standards, there are very strange creatures down there--some of them, in the deeper of the deep, are wispy, transparent animals barely different from the water around them, whose metabolisms are incredibly slow.

But there are also large animals about which we know next to nothing. And by large, they mean: very large. In this elegantly written review, Tim Flannery notes: "It says much of our ignorance that the very largest denizens of the deep have never been captured or seen alive." Scientists now believe that the fabled giant squid is a shrimp next to "the colossal squid...recognized as the largest of all invertebrates." They've figured this out mostly by examining the stomach of whales, that feed on them. "...for the great majority of squid families, the very smallest squid eaten by the whales exceeds in size the largest examples ever caught by a scientist."

The deepest of the deep is so far from sunlight that literally no light penetrates it. Yet the deep is not completely dark: bioluminicent creatures, who supply their own light, are far more common there than on land.

We know so little about the deep, and we aren't learning much more now, because there was only one vehicle capable of reaching the deepest ocean, and this robotic craft was lost at sea in 2003. There is no other.

But our persisting ignorance doesn't prevent us from destroying what we know not of. Our deadly chemicals are drifting down, and massive radioactive waste has been dumped into the depths (the Russians deep-sixed seventeen complete nuclear reactors into the Arctic Ocean.) Massive quantities of chemical weapons have been dumped, and lie on the sea bottoms.

Industrial waste has deformed and destroyed undersea life, and as our pollutants literally rain down into the oceans. The Climate Crisis will have its effects as well, particularly on the sea life known as coral. Vast coral forests, each of which can "support an abundance of life that rivals a tropical rainforest," have already been severely damaged and destroyed by fishing fleets--some of these forests were more than two thousand years old--scooping up the fish known as orange roughy, a deep sea perch, which otherwise has an estimated life span about twice that of humans.

Flannery concludes:

"The ocean depths are not some hellish and distant zone, but are an element of our living planet which is connected in very intimate and immediate ways to ourselves. They are also our last frontier, where wonders innumerable await the next generation of brave bathynauts who choose to journey there. Let us hope that we do not destroy this amazing place before they get their chance. "