Excerpt from The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

More than thirty-five years after Grassle and Maciolek's ground- breaking study, we are still a long way from knowing all that lives in the deep. In 2019, a team of seventeen lead scientists published the results of a three-year survey of the Pacific in an area of deep sea bigger than the state of California, involving hundreds of hours of dive time using remote-operated submersibles. In all, they photographed 347,000 animals, and only one in five of them were known species. Some were too small, or the pictures too blurry, to identify, but the majority were animals that nobody had ever seen before. The diversity of life is prolific in the deep, rivaling the shallow, familiar seas—perhaps even life on land.

A central inventory of deep-sea life, the World Register of Deep-Sea Species, has been growing since 2012, a cataloguing job that is far from complete, as more species are constantly being added. By 2020, there were 26,363 listed species. All these organisms, and multitudes more besides, have evolved ways to survive and thrive in the extreme conditions of the deep, something that until relatively recently was thought to be impossible.

Excerpted from The Brilliant Abyss by Helen Scales. Copyright © 2021 by Helen Scales. Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.