ECOLOGY
Deep Water: The World in the Ocean
James Bradley
Hamish Hamilton, $36.99

It’s a rare work of non-fiction that can make the reader weep with wonder then grief from one sentence to the next. James Bradley’s capacity to weave such an intense emotional spell with his writing was evident in his profound apocalyptic novel Clade, and now he brings that talent to his first book-length work of non-fiction Deep Water.

Water has been an ongoing theme in Bradley’s writing, and he dives right in – pun intended – with this celebration and commemoration of the marvels of the marine world.

But this isn’t simply a David Attenborough-like tour; this book is a far more in-depth and nuanced exploration of humanity’s past, present and possible futures, through the lens of the world’s oceans. “The ocean offers new ways of imagining the world and our relationship to it,” he writes. And so the book takes us on a journey through the many ways in which humanity’s fortunes are intimately and intricately tied to these vast bodies of water and the life that thrives within them.

It explores everything from the majestic and complex song of the humpback whale and how those communications are being gradually drowned out by human-made noise, to the history of swimming styles and how “an activity often regarded as entirely natural is in fact shaped by historical forces”. It travels from tropical island beaches to the bottom of the deepest marine trenches; from the decks of fishing trawlers into the mind of a cleaner wrasse.

We’re so used to thinking of oceans as “other”; a part of the planet that most of us have little engagement with aside from occasionally dipping our toes into, flying over, or consuming its denizens with a side of chips. Oceans – especially the deep – are largely viewed as empty, apart from the busy fringes where they intersect with the land. Out of sight, out of mind.

But Bradley reveals just how wrong that view is, and instead paints a portrait of a world not just teeming with life, but whose cycles have a profound impact on our terrestrial existence.

Our first error, according to the opening quote from Arthur C. Clarke, was to call our planet “‘Earth’, when clearly it is ‘Ocean’.” While this planet may not be the only one in our solar system with an ocean, the fact that salt water covers more than 70 per cent of its surface and all life emerged from those waters means we underestimate the importance of the marine world at our peril.

Our ignorance of this hidden world is also our loss because, as Bradley so beautifully describes, it is an extraordinary world. Take, for example, the astonishing phenomenon that is the nightly diel vertical migration, when an estimated 10 billion tonnes or more of living organisms rise from the oceans’ depths with the setting of the sun to feed closer to the surface in the relative security of darkness.