James Nestor’s ‘Deep’

James Nestor’s ‘Deep’

By DAVID EPSTEIN in the New York Times’ Book Reviews

How, in this age of surveillance, can we lose a 210-foot airplane? With its known initial flight path and fuel load, investigators can restrict the last possible position of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 to a sliver of the globe. Trouble is, most of that sliver — like 71 percent of Earth’s surface — is covered by water.

The difficulty of finding a Boeing 777 can serve as a symbol of how little we know about the portion of our planet that lies beneath the surface of the ocean. Had Flight 370 crashed into the moon or Mars, we would have found it by now, because we have better maps of those desiccated surfaces than of our own planet.

The ocean’s opacity makes James Nestor’s mission in “Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves” particularly ambitious: to see the sea, from surface eddies to fathomless trenches. The underwater travelogue begins near the ocean’s surface, where Nestor’s tour guides are competitors at the world freediving championship.

Competitive freediving, Nestor quickly makes clear, is a ridiculous sport. Divers hold their breath and see how low they can go without suffering grievous harm. Top divers submerge for more than three minutes and reach depths below 300 feet, where pressure causes human lungs to “shrink to the size of two baseballs,” Nestor writes. At first intrigued, Nestor quickly becomes disgusted as one diver after another surfaces with blood pouring from their noses, or dragged unconscious by rescue divers or in cardiac arrest. (In November, The New York Times ignited a public discussion of journalistic ethics with a photo of bulging-eyed Nicholas Mevoli moments after he emerged from a freedive record attempt and just before he blacked out and died.) When practiced outside the ­structure of competition and the reckless chasing of depth records, however, freediving can be practical, even beautiful. Nestor meets researchers who freedive in order to attach satellite transmitters to sharks by hand, and freediving amid marine life, Nestor writes, is “the most direct and intimate way to connect with the ocean.” Nestor himself decides to learn to freedive (not competitively), and via that process unveils startling facets of human physiology, most prominently the life-preserving reflexes known as the Master Switch of Life. Human divers survive at theoretically fatal pressures because of a reflexive retreat of blood from the extremities to the vital organs, which keeps the brain and heart flush with oxygen and the lungs engorged with enough blood to prevent collapse. Humans exposed to high pressure on land fail to flip the Master Switch. It is, then, a purely submarine aspect of our biology. Divers who learn to cultivate it, as Nestor does, can go up and down rapidly and stay submerged for several minutes.

Deep into “Deep,” in the most suspenseful narrative moment, Nestor freedives with sperm whales, a mother “the size of a school bus” and her “short bus”-size calf. “They look like landmasses,” Nestor writes, “submerged islands.” His fear is palpable, and rational. Playful whale roughhousing — like slapping a diver with a 12-foot tail fluke — tends to go poorly for the smaller mammal in the encounter. Nestor stays still as the whales approach to within 30 feet and shower him in a fusillade of echolocation clicks. The signals that the whales receive from rebounding sound waves allow them to assay another animal, and to image the innards, like a waterborne version of X-rays. “The clicks now sound like jackhammers on pavement,” Nestor writes, as the water around him vibrates with energy. The whales “are scanning us inside and out.” Apparently satisfied with Nestor’s organs, the whales then switch to a short, patterned series of “coda clicks,” thought to be a personal signature. The whales, it seems, are identifying themselves. Afterward, they slip back into the wavering shadows, “and the ocean, once again, falls silent.”

While the scientific claims of freediving researchers can be specious — “pretty flimsy scientific cover to go swimming with whales,” as one scientist puts it — Nestor’s awe-inspiring encounter is made possible only because he learns how to stay underwater for extended periods. Next to the ocean itself, and Nestor, the Master Switch is the most important character in “Deep.” It is the apotheosis of the evolutionary connections of humans to marine life that Nestor enumerates, from the ability of blind people (and dolphins and whales) to use echolocation, to evidence that humans (like sharks) might have a navigational instinct predicated on Earth’s magnetic field. On very rare occasions, Nestor stretches the human-marine connection. He writes of “sea creatures with whom we share a great deal of DNA,” an insight that is meaningful only in an extremely superficial genetic context. But that is a drop in Nestor’s wondrous ocean.

There is a point about 30 feet below the surface that freedivers know as “neutral buoyancy.” Beneath it, the ocean stops trying to spit you out and begins sucking you in. That is how “Deep” itself unfolds.

The first two chapters, “0” and “−60” — corresponding to the depths they explore — are in freedive range. Much beneath that, freedivers are limited in what they can see, so Nestor travels the world meeting scientists and explorers who can reveal what is below. The deeper the book ventures into the ocean, the more dramatic and unusual the organisms therein and the people who observe them. Nestor takes a harrowing ride to −2,500 feet with one D.I.Y. submarine builder from New Jersey. The man operates his vessel in Honduras because “taking tourists down 70 stories in a homemade, unlicensed submarine, without insurance, was a liability nightmare,” and regulations in Honduras are “lax or nonexistent.” It adds to the drama when they reach the “midnight zone” — where light ceases to penetrate the water and some organisms have evolved into hermaphrodites to double their chance of bumping into a potential mate — and the hull of the bubble-gum-and-duct-tape sub begins creaking and fizzing.

The final chapter is “−28,700,” the hadal zone — named for Hades, the Greek mythological underworld — where the environment is alien enough that it could be on some other planet circling some other star. And yet, there is only one thing that all life on earth requires: not sunlight, not even oxygen, but water. The abyssal depths are crawling with organisms that have followed unique evolutionary paths for millions of years. “It’s as if,” Nestor writes in his precise prose, “there were an archipelago of Galápagos Islands buried beneath five miles of black ocean.” There are four-inch-wide, single-celled xenophyophores; “albino shrimp the size of a house cat”; fish with “fins shaped like bird wings and . . . vibration sensors on their heads.” In fact, the deep ocean appears to have the greatest biodiversity of any ­habitat on earth, but most of it remains unknown. Whenever a net is dropped below 3,000 feet, a majority of species dragged up with it have never been seen before.

In the epilogue, “Ascents,” Nestor comes back up through the depths, rapidly enough to give the reader a version of the bends, but it serves as a beautiful construct allowing him to revisit “Deep’s” dramatis personae. It’s the finale of Nestor’s reportorial trip down to Hades and back again. Through his eyes and his stories, it’s a journey well worth taking.

DEEP

Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us About Ourselves

By James Nestor

Illustrated. 266 pp. An Eamon Dolan Book/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.

David Epstein’s first book, “The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance,” came out in paperback in April.

 

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A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice

 

An Amazon Best Book of the Month

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“The deeper the book ventures into the ocean, the more dramatic and unusual the organisms therein and the people who observe them…Through [Nestor's] eyes and his stories, it’s a journey well worth taking.”

— David Epstein, New York Times Book Review

"Put Deep at the top of your reading list. This book will do for the oceans what Cosmos did for space. It's mind-bending, intrepid, and inspiring."
— Po Bronson

 

"We’ve all seen documentary footage of strange deep-sea creatures, trundling along a hazy ocean floor, maybe even glowing in the dark. But how much do we really know about these ecosystems, and how much have we forgotten about our own profound connection to the ocean? With verve and humor, the author describes his own risk-taking attempts to understand the ocean's ancient secrets and future potential and the daring and brilliant people who have dedicated their lives to probing deeper ... [Nestor's] writing is sharp, colorful, and thrilling ... Bring[s] the ocean to life from a research perspective as well as a human one. An adventurous and frequently dazzling look at our planet's most massive habitat."
— Kirkus

"A thrilling account, made timely by the rapidly changing state of earth’s most expansive environment." — Publishers Weekly

"The deeper the book ventures into the ocean, the more dramatic and unusual the organisms therin and the people who observe them...through his eyes and his stories, it’s a journey well worth taking."--New York Times Book Review

 

"Nestor is crisp with his fun, seafaring facts; he is sober with his sprinkling of environmental bulletins. The book never preaches, and it’s a zippy read."--Los Angeles Times

Biography

James Nestor has written for Outside Magazine, Dwell Magazine, National Public Radio,The New York Times, Men's Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and more. His science/adventure book, DEEP: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Eamon Dolan Books) will be released in the US and UK on June 24, 2014. (Germany, China, Brazil, and other editions will be released in 2014/2015.). The book follows clans of extreme athletes, adventurers, and scientists as they plumb the limits of the ocean's depths and uncover weird and wondrous new discoveries that, in many cases, redefine our understanding of the ocean and ourselves.