The world as we know it is mapped to the last detail. Even before the ubiquity of satellites and global travel, the earth was a seemingly known quantity. Explored, charted and tamed over hundreds of years. And, more recently, even the skies above us have become much less mysterious thanks to massive and increasingly sophisticated telescopic arrays, which have evolved rapidly from the first-ever image captured of the moon — a daguerreotype taken in 1851, a few years before TAG Heuer was founded — into incredibly complex space telescopes finding earth-like planets hundreds of light-years away.
It’s surprising then that over 80 percent of our world’s oceans are unexplored and largely unknown. This is largely because of the incredible challenges posed by deep sea exploration. In many ways, it’s easier to put a rover on Mars than on the bottom of the most inhospitable parts of the seafloor. The vast majority of the known underwater world — and underwater life, for that matter — exists in the so-called sunlight zone, which, like most commercial dive watches, extends to a depth of around 200 meters. Deeper down, we enter the twilight zone. Here light is more scarce, and life has to adapt to harsh conditions. Giant, predatory sperm whales hunt giant squid in this dim realm — like something out of a Jules Verne novel. Once the depth gauge clicks to 1,000 meters, we enter the evocatively and aptly named midnight zone. This sparsely populated underwater world is dominated by a lack of sunlight and intense pressure, making what life can
