New Research Reveals the Wonders of the Deep 

By Claire Nouvian
The Deep

Love at first sight is how journalist and filmmaker Claire Nouvian describes her first glimpse of the exotic creatures of the deep sea, "some with surprising shapes or baffling colors, others that spat out threatening flashes of blue light, and others still that undulated with infinite grace, producing iridescent sparkles." She was captivated, desperate to know more, and disappointed at the dearth of information available to the general public. "How is it possible that the Earth bears such marvels and that people don't even know about them?" she asked. Since the book she wanted didn't exist, she created it herself. The result is The Deep, an aesthetic introduction to the deep sea with over 200 striking photos that range from sublime to grotesque and 14 short, accessible essays by the world's leading oceanographers. Here, we offer an excerpt from Nouvian's introduction and four of the oceanographers' essays. To see photos from The Deep, please request a print version of the Winter 2007-2008 issue of American Educator from amered@aft.org.

—EDITORS

On dry land, most organisms are confined to the surface or, at most, to altitudes of a 100 meters—the height of the tallest trees. In the oceans, though, available living space has both vertical and horizontal dimensions. With an average depth of 3,800 meters, the oceans offer 99 percent of the space where life can develop on Earth. A staggering thought.

The deep sea, which has been immersed in total darkness since the dawn of time, occupies 85 percent of this space, and thus forms the planet's largest habitat.

And what do we know about it?

Compared to what remains to be discovered, practically nothing. The earliest explorations of the midocean ridges date back to the 1970s. The first midwater dives to explore the vast deep-sea domain took place in the 1980s; even the very first studies of the deep seafloor were undertaken only relatively recently, with the large-scale oceanographic trawling campaigns of the 19th century. Currently, only about five percent of the seafloor has been mapped with any reasonable degree of detail, which relegates the overwhelming majority of the abyssal plains and other deep-sea habitats to the unknown. Moreover, in some of the expeditions carried out in the Southern Atlantic or around seamounts in the Pacific, 50 percent to 90 percent of the specimens coming up in the nets are unidentified specimens. For the last 25 years, a new deep-sea species has been described every two weeks, on average. Current estimates about the number of species yet to be discovered vary between 10 and 30 million. By comparison, the number of known species populating the planet today, whether terrestrial, aerial, or marine, is estimated at about 1.4 million. The deep sea no longer has anything to prove; it is without a doubt Earth's largest reservoir of life.