FOR MILLENNIA, HUMANITY’S relationship with the sea has been almost entirely with its surface and its edges.
The coast is where we meet the forces, opportunities and vastness of the ocean, which – when its mood is right – lets us swim, sail, fish and trade. But apart from the knowledge acquired, often at great cost, from fishing and exploration, our understanding of the sea has lacked depth. When we watch the Sun rise or set over the water, we are seeing nature at its most glorious, but under that horizon, deep down where we all came from, there exists a world that is deep, dark and unknown.
Unknown? Well, yes, if you look at the numbers. There is a consensus among marine biologists that we have probably identified and classified less than 10 per cent of the species that live in our oceans, which wash over 70 per cent of our world. And despite the remarkable mapping technology that is now charting the topography of their trenches, sea mounts and rifts, we still have more precise mapping of the surface of the Moon than we do of our ocean floors.
And as for the species count, well, we’re hard pressed to classify the fungi in our forests, let alone
