I recently learned to dive in the bay of Dakar. It was exciting. I’d started learning in a Leeds swimming pool and though I knew the ocean would feel different, I didn’t expect it to feel comfortable. It shouldn’t. It is not my element, and humans have long since left it to the rest of the ocean’s creatures. I also didn’t think the ocean would sound like my neck when I roll it during yoga: that same crackle.
With their remarkable sonar, dolphins can even tell when a human is pregnant
That the ocean is not quiet is one of the most pleasing revelations of the past century (I mean the ocean’s native noise, the fish songs and grunting and whistles – not ships’ propellers). But it is not the best revelation. That is the increasing understanding about the ocean’s inhabitants, no longer just Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘slimy things’. Snapping shrimp have ‘a special mechanism on their pincers to produce a shockwave that is powerful enough to stun or kill worms’. With their remarkable sonar, dolphins can even tell when a human is pregnant. It’s as though they have their own MRIs and X-rays, as well as getting high on pufferfish venom.
Human knowledge of the ocean and its life has expanded at the same rate that the risk to the ocean from humans has. This now puts us in a strange position, of being exposed to wondrous facts about those seven-tenths of the inaptly named Earth, while wondering how to save it from the pestilence that is humanity.
James Bradley took on a tall order when he decided to write a biography of the ocean. It is a manful effort, and I use that word deliberately while thinking of his fascinating chapter on the history of swimming, in which the only woman is one who is braving shark-infested waters to escape her rapist kidnappers. For Bradley, the history of swimming is a male one, which would come as a surprise to the Ama, the female pearl divers of Japan, first recorded in the year 927.
The ocean is as vast as knowledge about it, so it helps to have a prism. Bradley’s is both geographical – he is Australian and his focus is on the southern hemisphere, and there’s nothing wrong with that – and political. His insistence on the terrible toll of globalisation and capitalism does begin to pall after much repetition. Snap like a shrimp, but not too often. Still, it is brave to go from the wonderful songs of fish to slave songs on slave ships.
There is wonder – at prawns found living merrily two miles deeper than scientists had ever found them before. In the Boso Triple Junction (if you ever feel idle, explore the names humans have attached to the seas), a deep diver found a meadow of crinoids – ‘delicate flowerlike organisms related to sea urchins and starfish that anchor themselves to the bottom and use their petals to feed’ – 9,000 metres deep. A vast field of what look like yellow flowers, in waters thought deep and dead.
But there is much horror, too: Torres Strait islanders have to watch the sea snatch their land and churn up their graveyards, so they beachcomb for the skulls and bones of their ancestors. The ocean used to encroach a metre every five years; now it is three metres a year. There are hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons dumped in the depths, along with at least 18,000 radio-active objects somewhere at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. One is the nuclear submarine K-27, scuttled along with its nuclear reactor in 1982 (when depth charges didn’t work, they rammed it with a tug). Don’t know what to do with your nuclear waste? That’s what the sea is for. The British government, writes Bradley, is currently exploring dumping 750,000 cubic metres of nuclear waste beneath the seabed off Cumbria. All this toxic trash, says one unnamed source, is ‘Chernobyl in slow motion on the sea floor’.
But it is not just dastardly governments who litter the ocean. It is all of us. When Victor Vescovo reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench in 2019, he found wondrous marine life and a plastic bag, lolly wrappers and fragments of a balloon decorated with Elsa and Olaf from Frozen. The Mariana Trench is nearly seven miles deep.
The eminent fisheries expert Daniel Pauly once opened a review of a book on fish with a sigh, hoping that it would not be ‘yet another helpless commentary on the way we are trashing our oceans’. Is Deep Water helpless? Not if you believe information is power. Read it and you may find your determination to fight for our oceans no longer dissolves in mile-deep trenches of overwhelm.
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