Comments on: Book review – The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed

By: Book review – Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 14:13:27 +0000

[…] eggshells. In the oceans, zooplankton move carbon and other elements from the surface to the deep during giant daily migrations, forming one component of the so-called biological pump. But whales, because of their sheer size, […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – Endless Novelties of Extraordinary Interest: The Voyage of H.M.S. Challenger and the Birth of Modern Oceanography | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 15:30:41 +0000

[…] There is much material Macdougall can draw on. After the expedition ended, its scientists would study the vast trove of data, samples, and specimens for 19 years with the help of a growing international network of other scholars. The results were published from 1880 to 1895 in a report series that would span 50(!) volumes. It was a show of government support that would leave many scientists today green with envy. Some examples of the many questions studied included the nature of the ocean floor. The thinking was that all of the world’s oceans were covered in layers of muddy chalk, the same material as the fossil shells making up the famous white cliffs of Dover. Soon enough, however, the scientists found different sediments. Remarkably, the seafloor sediment maps they produced for the Challenger Report have not changed much in their rough outlines since. Another open question was whether the deep sea was home to primitive organisms or even “living fossils”, but no such animals were found. They did find many bioluminescent organisms, although opinions differed as to what caused this; the pioneering work of Raphaël Dubois, who illuminated the biochemistry underlying this phenomenon, was still in the future. Finally, the scientists constantly dredged up manganese nodules. These potato-sized, black, spherical objects were rich in metals and the Challenger scientists worked out that these grew extremely slowly when dissolved manganese precipitated around objects such as shark teeth, bits of whalebone, or pieces of pumice. Though interest in them gradually waned after the expedition, the idea of mining the deep sea for metals has captured the imagination again in recent decades, much to the concern of marine biologists. […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – Life Sculpted: Tales of the Animals, Plants, and Fungi That Drill, Break, and Scrape to Shape the Earth | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 09:39:09 +0000

[…] weird world of whale falls and the worms that feed on them. I briefly encountered these in The Brilliant Abyss, but Martin goes into far more detail here. When whale carcasses sink to the bottom of the ocean, […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World | The Inquisitive Biologist

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 15:05:21 +0000

[…] bizarre critters abound in all good popular science books about the deep sea. Helen Scales’s The Brilliant Abyss and Alex Rogers’s The Deep could give Czerski a run for her money, except that her physics […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green | The Inquisitive Biologist

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 12:04:53 +0000

[…] mines in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. He also considers the controversial final frontier of deep-sea mining, the possibilities and limits of recycling and reusing batteries, and the prospect of reopening […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – The Empty Sea: The Future of the Blue Economy | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 13:51:29 +0000

[…] Deep-sea mining is put down as senseless as there is nothing of value down there, though in The Brilliant Abyss, Helen Scales showed that companies are exploring it and obtaining mining concessions, which […]

LikeLike

By: Book review – The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of Clean Energy and Digital Technologies | The Inquisitive Biologist

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 16:44:05 +0000

[…] so we mine and drill in ever more extreme environments, including plans to mine asteroids and the deep sea. Bonus points for Pitron for mentioning the underappreciated concept of energy returned on energy […]

LikeLike