The Deepest Map: The High-Stakes Race to Chart the World's Oceans

by Laura Trethewey Narrated by Gabra Zackman

Overview

The dramatic and action-packed story of the last mysterious place on earth-the world's seafloor-and the deep-sea divers, ocean mappers, marine biologists, entrepreneurs, and adventurers involved in the historic push to chart it, as well as the opportunities, challenges, and perils this exploration holds now and for the future.

Five oceans-the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic, and the Southern-cover approximately 70 percent of the earth. Yet we know little about what lies beneath them. By the early 2020s, less than twenty-five percent of the ocean's floor has been charted, most close to shorelines, and over three quarters of the ocean lies in in what is called the Deep Sea, depths below a thousand meters. Now, the race is on to completely map the ocean's floor by 2030-an epic project involving scientists, investors, militaries,*and private explorers who are cooperating and competing to get an accurate reading of this vast terrain and understand its contours and environment.

*In The Deepest Map, Laura Trethewey documents this race to the bottom, following global efforts around the world, from crowdsourcing to advances in technology, recent scientific discoveries to tales of dangerous dives in untested and costly submersibles. The lure of ocean exploration has attracted many, including the likes of James Cameron, Richard Branson, Ray Dalio, and Eric Schmidt. The Deepest Map follows a cast of intriguing characters, from early mappers such as Marie Tharp, a woman working in the male-dominated fields of oceanography and geology whose discoveries have added significantly to our knowledge; Victor Vescovo, a man obsessed with reaching the deepest depths of each of the five oceans, and his young, brilliant, and fearless mapper Cassie Bongiovanni; and the diverse entrepreneurs looking to explore and exploit this uncharted territory and its resources.

In The Deepest Map, ocean discovery converges with humanity's origin story; in mapping the ocean floor, scientists are actively tracing our roots back to the most inhospitable places on earth where life began-and flourished. But for every conservationist looking to protect the seafloor, there are others who see its commercial potential. Will a new map exacerbate pollution and the degradation of this natural resource? How will the race remake political power structures in years to come? Trethewey probes these questions as countries and conglomerates wrestle over the riches that may lie at the bottom of the sea.

The future of humanity depends on our ability to protect this vast, precious, and often ignored resource. A true tale of science, nature, technology, and an extreme outdoor adventure The Deepest Map illuminates why we love-and fear-the earth's final frontier and is a crucial addition to the increasingly urgent conversation about climate change.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Editorial Reviews

AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile

Gabra Zackman brings her convincing style, resonant timbre, and precise timing to this nonfiction audiobook. Whether the author is talking about record-setting deep dives or the detailed work of ocean mapping, Zackman gives contours to the global research and high-seas adventures. The stakes for the planet are far more significant than the goals of billionaire adventurers who are setting undersea records. Some privileged explorers have recently descended to the depths with fatal results. The implications of mapping the ocean floors are extraordinary. As the author points out, we know less about the depths of our oceans than we do about the moon or Mars. There are minerals, buried ships, and undiscovered life forms. Most importantly, the deep seas might reveal secrets about the origin of our species. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

05/29/2023

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. (July)

From the Publisher

"There is no doubt in my mind that the ocean plays the most massive role in our past, present, and future—from transportation to planet health to long term sustainability. The Deepest Map shines a light on this massive yet ever-changing force and helps bring into focus so many unanswered questions, while giving us a beautiful reminder of how important it is to educate and protect these waters to the best of our abilities."
— Garrett McNamara, Big Wave surfer, co-creator of the documentary series 100 Foot Wave and author of Hound of the Sea

"Wow, what a great adventure story. Shipwrecks, octopus gardens, coral reefs as tall as the Empire State Building, 11,000 year-old sponges, deep sea robots—it’s a trip to another world, right here on Earth. This is not just a book about the epic quest to map the ocean floor, but an exploration of the mysteries and life of a planet we hardly know. The Deepest Map is one of those rare books that will change the way you see our world." — Jeff Goodell, author of The Water Will Come

"A riveting ocean of a book, packed with gripping adventures, high-stakes exploration and political intrigue. Trethewey leads us to the bottom of the sea and deftly shows why it all matters so much." — Helen Scales, author of The Brilliant Abyss

"The Deepest Map is a fascinating, poetic love letter to our planet and to the scientists and explorers risking their lives to understand its unconscious. With exhaustive reporting, Trethewey takes us on an awe-inspiring and humbling adventure that makes us realize how much we still have to learn about our home." — Jaimal Yogis, author of All Our Waves Are Water

"An engrossing look at deep-sea exploration. Essential reading for environmentalists, armchair adventure divers, and those who care about the world’s oceans." — Kirkus (Starred Review)

"Trethewey’s sharp eye for character brings out the humanity in the marine moonshot. It’s worth exploring." — Publishers Weekly

“[The] questions Trethewey encourages us to ponder in The Deepest Map are not centered around whether to map and explore the deep sea, they’re about how that exploration happens, who controls it, and what it leaves behind. The deep sea could become our next Amazon…heavily plundered and degraded. Or it could become our next Antarctica, governed by international treaties that protect it in the name of science. Trethewey’s thorough accounting of our knowledge of and relationship to this ‘last truly mysterious place on Earth’ can only help us along the right path.” — Atlantic Books Review

"This adventure on the high seas follows scientific explorers who are charting the seafloor in exquisite detail. But as with any exploration of uncharted territory, mapping the bottom of the ocean risks spoiling a place largely untouched by humans." — Science News Magazine

"A gripping, timely account of the world’s push—by inventors, scientists, business people and government—to map the ocean’s floor." — The Globe and Mail

AUGUST 2023 - AudioFile

Gabra Zackman brings her convincing style, resonant timbre, and precise timing to this nonfiction audiobook. Whether the author is talking about record-setting deep dives or the detailed work of ocean mapping, Zackman gives contours to the global research and high-seas adventures. The stakes for the planet are far more significant than the goals of billionaire adventurers who are setting undersea records. Some privileged explorers have recently descended to the depths with fatal results. The implications of mapping the ocean floors are extraordinary. As the author points out, we know less about the depths of our oceans than we do about the moon or Mars. There are minerals, buried ships, and undiscovered life forms. Most importantly, the deep seas might reveal secrets about the origin of our species. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2023-05-02
An engrossing look at deep-sea exploration.

Mapping the ocean floor requires complex technology, politics, and patience, but it attracts brilliant scientists, entrepreneurs, and as many adventurous billionaires as space travel. Fortunately, it has also attracted journalist Trethewey, author of Imperiled Ocean. As she writes, the sentence, “We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the bottom of the ocean…appears in almost every article you read about the deep sea nowadays.” Yet life exists at the deepest points throughout the world: “blown-out, flattened volcanoes known as guyots, mud volcanos spewing methane, underwater lakes known as brine pools that are so salty they are lethal to almost every life-form except a few microorganisms that might be analogues to the aliens we seek on distant planets.” One of the author’s main characters is Texas financier Victor Vescovo. Already featured in Susan Casey’s fine recent book, The Underworld, Vescovo has outfitted a research ship, commissioned a cutting-edge submersible, and proceeded to dive to the deepest points in all five oceans. Since no one knew precisely where those points were, a good deal of mapping occurred along with pioneering scientific experiments and hair-raising adventures, all of which Trethewey vividly recounts. Researchers yearn for an alternative to survey ships, which cost upward of $50,000 per day. Unmanned drones work fairly well, but they have not caught on. Crowdsourcing accounts recruit fishing vessels, luxury yachts, cruise ships, and commercial shippers that routinely use sonar depth finders to contribute to the effort, and experts are digging through industrial archives for soundings filed and forgotten. Mapping the seafloor will bring benefits, but Trethewey reminds readers that intrepid explorers who mapped the continents were followed by colonists who proceeded to “consume, exhaust, and extinguish” the resources and human cultures they found. The deep sea is a treasure of pure metals. Commercial deep-sea mining is about to begin, and the process is horrendously destructive.

Essential reading for environmentalists, armchair adventure divers, and those who care about the world’s oceans.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159815460
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,015,646

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