The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

Susan Casey's The Underworld, a book about deep sea exploration, has received rave reviews, but I found myself underwhelmed. Substantively, her book contains very little information that isn't already online: this is not new information, but old material, presented newly. Unfortunately, this leads to two major shortcomings.

First, the chief value she adds to existing information is a series of in-depth interviews with people engaged in exploring and studying the deep sea. Her interviews, however, border on hagiographic - in fact, she goes out of her way to dismiss and defend some of them against serious concerns about the colonial nature of their endeavours, instead of taking these arguments seriously, as they ought to be. It feels as show more though she uncritically accepts and believes anything she's told: her scepticism is reserved only for a museum docent who mansplains, she says, and has nothing to do with the subject material of the book. I'm not the only one to feel this way: in the Scientific American, a review notes that "Although Casey pays lip service to Vescovo's critics, The Underworld would have benefited from a more thorough examination of ocean exploration's politics and power dynamics. In the 21st century, must our most celebrated adventurers remain impossibly rich white guys?" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/todays-deep-sea-explorers-are-mineral... It is particularly acute when you realise that Vescovo, a rich hobbyist explorer who receives fulsome praise from Casey, is also known for doing reckless solo dives and freewheeling on safety precautions. After the Triton sub incident, and the vast amount of public funds expended on attempting to rescue the rich and reckless, can we afford to be so flippant about the subject?

Second, when you have no new research to contribute, but you write an essay, the expectation is that you write in a manner that presents the information lucidly, in a way that is engaging to the reader, and a pleasure to read. Otherwise, you're writing a high school science report. I found her writing passable at best, and often amateurish, bordering on egregious. Debris around the wreck of the Titanic is described as a "piñata of tragedy". When she's not being flippantly funny, she's buried deep in the purplest of prose, as though she had never come across an adjective or a cliche she didn't immediately want to insert in her book. Perhaps I'm being a little harsh - it's clear that she's passionate about the ocean, cares deeply about conservation, and loves the water. Still, when the quality of nature writing is set to a high bar by authors like Helen MacDonald, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Camille Dungy, it's hard to accept this level of glib, uncritical pedestrian prose. I'm sure Booktok will enjoy it. show less

I love finding out all the stuff we don't know yet. And the ocean is so unexplored it's mind numbing. This was clearly written just before the Titan disaster last year, so there's no commentary on that. I'm thinking the author would be sympathetic to their cause though. It's a difficult tug of war between wanting to know everything about the ocean and wanting to leave it undisturbed and alive.

without the pressure of the deep ocean, the snailfish would not maintain its form. aquanauts have documented it in water squarely in the hadal zone just shy of 27,000 feet. no other fish has been seen to go that deep. however, that does not mean life ends there. life still abounds below that: amphipods, crinoids, etc.

this book takes us on a journey exploring the deep ocean, especially the hadal zone trenches, with the author over the span of a few years in the late 20-teens and early 2020s. she tagged along with a team of some of the most renowned deep sea explorers and adventurers on a series of dives in a newly engineered submarine that could withstand the pressures of the hadal zone deeps in the 5 deepest places under the ocean, show more including the deepest: the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. not only did she witness and report, she dove and actually piloted one of the subs for about 15 minutes earning her a dolphin pin from Don Walsh who, along with Jacques Piccard, was the first to set down in the Challenger Deep.

Casey, the author - a journalist by trade, gives us some history of deep sea expiration and then gets into the modern pursuit of achieving the deepest dive or the most number of deep dives, etc. i found her prose easy to read and decent blend of factual narrative and personal anecdote - “on the scene” reporting. fascinating stuff if you like engineering, exploration, adventuring, biology, travel, etc., etc.

while she sticks mostly with the story of chasing the deepest dives in the deepest parts of the ocean, she does spend a bit of time on treasure-hunting old galleons and other shipwrecks as well as political and legal pushes to mine the abyssal and hadal zones - really, just another kind of treasure hunt.

the book ticks a log of boxes for those of us interested in such expansions of the human experience and the planets upon which we live, but remains accessible for those who might not want all the technical detail (i do wish she had provided more!). informative and engaging. show less

This book is filled with facinating facts about the deepest sites in the ocean. Casey's approach is that of a neophyte who joins adventurers and scientists as they explore these little known places on the earth. She makes compelling cases for their preservation and the need for further exploration.

An exceptional book! Such an amazing world that has been for so long overlooked. Thank you, Susan Casey for sharing your adventures and insights. Ms Casey is a wonderful writer. She really captures one's attention and doesn't let go. I will be following up on her suggestions of ways to help protect the depths of the ocean. Thank you for bringing its importance and fragility to my attention in such an engaging way!