Protecting the deep sea is not just a matter of nature conservation, but also essential for the rest of the planet. Because of the Ocean Summit, everything I have drawn, read, and listened to is dedicated to the explorer who mapped this hidden world.
Drawing
Reading
A few years ago, I came across The Remarkable Life of William Beebe, by Carol Grant Gould. It is a wonderful biography of one of the last true explorers (on planet Earth).
As a biologist/ornithologist/jack-of-all-trades, Beebe undertook countless expeditions that are difficult to summarize briefly, but the most evocative are his deep-sea expeditions with the Bathysphere. From this small steel sphere, he descended on a cable to a depth of almost 1 km in the ocean in 1930 and described the wonderful, luminous life at this depth.
The Bathysphere adventure is featured in Brad Fox's The Light of the Deep Sea, published last year. Using personal notes, drawings, and photographs, the expedition is explored in more depth in short chapters. With detours into his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and his obsession with Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands. What a fascinating life.
Listen
Smog was Bill Callahan's band. The album Wild Love (1995) opened with the song Bathysphere. To be honest, I don't really like the song, but given the theme of the week, I couldn't leave it out, could I?
I do really appreciate Smog's Cold Blooded Old Times. Bill Callahan himself has also produced a lot of beautiful music, such as the fragile Apocalypse (2011).
See you next week!
We would do well to listen to what they learned: Wipe out all of the lantern fish in the twilight zone, and we may well see a spike in global surface temperatures from which we can't recover. - There's a New Reason to Save Life in the Deep Ocean (NYT)