The Deepest Map
The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Globe and Mail Top 100 Selection
Five oceans cover approximately seventy per cent of the earth, yet we know little of what lies beneath them. Now, the race is on to completely map the oceans’ floor. Scientists, investors, militaries, and private explorers are competing in this epic venture to obtain an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.
In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey chronicles this race to the bottom. Following global efforts around the world, she documents Inuit-led crowdsourced mapping in the Arctic as climate change alters the landscape, a Texas millionaire’s efforts to become the first man to dive to the deepest point in each ocean, and the increasingly fraught question of whether and how to mine the deep sea.
A true tale of science, nature, technology, and extreme outdoor adventure, The Deepest Map both illuminates why we love — and fear — the earth’s final frontier and contributes to increasingly urgent conversations about climate change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this fascinating account, journalist Trethewey (Imperiled Ocean) details the quest to "finish a complete map of the world's seafloor by the end of the next decade." She profiles scientists, businessmen, and hobbyists working on the Seabed 2030 Project, an initiative spearheaded by a Japanese philanthropic organization that in 2017 set out to plot the bottom of the world's oceans. The cast of characters includes Cassie Bongiovanni, a shy oceanographer recruited by private equity investor Victor Vescovo to locate some of the "deepest points on the entire planet" so that he might one day set the record for the deepest dive (he agreed to share the expedition's findings with the 2030 Project), and Richard Jenkins, founder of the Saildrone company, which manufactures unmanned submersibles capable of scanning the ocean floor. The mapping process, Trethewey explains, is conducted with sonar that measures depth by recording how long it takes for a "ping" to travel from the device to the bottom of the ocean and back. Attempts to squish together the history of ocean mapping, the intricacies of oceanographic methods, and the possible consequences of the 2030 Project's success (a boom in deep sea mining, for one) can make this feel overstuffed, but Trethewey's sharp eye for character brings out the humanity in the marine moonshot. It's worth exploring.
