"Your idea of the Deep Sea is not a human phenomenological experience" - Communicating the deepest reaches of the sea
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Think of the ocean.
Did you imagine the blue sea with the sun glistening on the surface and an endless horizon? Did the sound of waves crashing upon the shore come to your ears? Can you smell the hint of sea salt and kelp drying on stones? Or perhaps you’re remembering a snorkeling experience, with shallow coral reefs just out of reach.
A haenyeo might think of places much deeper. And even fewer still reading this would be technical divers, fathoming depths of 60 meters or more and whose experiences of the deep sea involve careful manipulation of technology to reduce harm.
And yet we can go deeper.
Images from the deep sea reveal a mysterious and alien world to us, where our presence, if you can call it that, can only exist at a distance; or in extreme cases, mediated through incredibly complex technology. Did you know that past 400 meters depth, the air we breathe turns into a supercritical fluid? To quote from Chemistry Learner, a supercritical fluid “is a fluid which exists above a critical point of pressure and temperature where no separate liquid and gas phases exist. However, the pressure is below what is required to compress it into a solid.” In other words: not solid, not gas, not liquid.
The amazing visualisations of the deep sea freely available to the public can only come through an artistic medium: photographs of towering hydrothermal vents, videos of a feasting during a whale fall, and illustrations of sea pigs.
“Your idea of the Deep Sea is not a human phenomenological experience. It is a mediated abstraction? ‘known’ to you through artistic media: photos, recordings, illustrations and more.”
This is the thesis that Georgia Wells presented during the SciComm Southwest conference at the University of the West of England earlier in 2024. By which she means that our collective knowledge and what and how we imagine the deep sea is not something we, individually, have experienced: it is a societal collection of images, scientific descriptions and the art based on those descriptions that give us an imagined deep sea.
Wells’ words are the kind of wisdom imparted with two effects: on the one hand, these words act as a missing link between disparate sources of knowledge held in my mind; and on the other, these words help me recontextualise assumptions about how I thought I experienced or perceived the world, thus creating a clear before-and-after break from the way I related to, in this case, my conceptualisation of what the “Deep Sea” is.
For me, sitting in that audience, it was both.
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I knew these factoids about the Deep Ocean, all in separate forms, really. While the deep sea has been mapped, that’s to a resolution of 5kms. More people have been to the moon (12) than to the deepest part of the Mariana’s Trench (3).
And yet without Well’s words, in that particular formulation, made me think about not just what I knew but how I knew.? And that is a truly transformational experience.
Article written by Ian Cooke Tapia
Illustrations by Ian Cooke Tapia and Oli M.
Georgia Wells is a Bristol-based marine biologist and science communicator specialising in demystifying the deep sea working for Armatus Oceanic and as editor of the Deep Sea Podcast. She is also a science illustrator.