Fathoms: the world in the whale

By Rebecca Giggs

WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN NONFICTION
WINNER OF THE NIB LITERARY AWARD
FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING ON GLOBAL CONSERVATION

A SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘There is a kind of hauntedness in wild animals today: a spectre related to environmental change … Our fear is that the unseen spirits that move in them are ours. Once more, animals are a moral force.’

When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis?

In Fathoms: the world in the whale, Giggs blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore these questions with clarity and hope. In lively, inventive prose, she introduces us to whales so rare they have never been named; she tells us of the astonishing variety found in whale sounds, and of whale ‘pop’ songs that sweep across hemispheres. She takes us into the deeps to discover that one whale’s death can spark a great flourishing of creatures. We travel to Japan to board whaling ships, examine the uncanny charisma of these magnificent mammals, and confront the plastic pollution now pervading their underwater environment.

In the spirit of Rachel Carson and John Berger, Fathoms is a work of profound insight and wonder. It marks the arrival of an essential new voice in narrative nonfiction and provides us with a powerful, surprising, and compelling view of some of the most urgent issues of our time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Apr 28, 2020
• ISBN: 9781925693423

Rebecca Giggs

Rebecca Giggs is an award-winning writer from Perth, Australia. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Best Australian Essays, Best Australian Science Writing, and other publications. Fathoms is her first book.

Reviews for Fathoms

[spinsterrevival · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This was a really lovely and important book for me. I always had whale calendars through my high school years wanting to be a marine biologist, but of course life changes course many times. There’s so much still to learn here as evidenced by the fact that the first recorded whale fall was in 1977, so it’s the same age as me. This book blends so much history, mythology, literature, science, and whale experience that it’s a lot to take in; I want to spend more time with it all.

[breic-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Overwritten, with far too little content. > nonessential shipping and boating was suspended in the wake of the [9/11] attacks, creating a unique experimental 'control' — or as near to — in the wild. Many American and Canadian ports were temporarily halted, or stayed open to only restricted small-vessel traffic. Looking at traces of the whales' hormones, the scientists saw evidence of the new serenity.> Scientists have speculated that as their numbers have grown, the whales have decreased their call intensity (their volume), and, concomitantly, their pitch has dropped. Today's Antarctic blue whales may be quieter, and lower-toned, than in previous decades merely because more whales are communicating, and over shorter distances. … Recent monitoring of Antarctic blue whales has shown that, during the austral summer, their pitch rises again. The whales increasingly have to use their most forceful forte volume to be heard amid the cracking ice> Noc's voice is, to date, the only verifiable example of human mimicry by a whale. Listening to a recording, the beluga sounds less like a faithful imitation of speech than a helium-ed caricature — burbling and slurpy, more Looney Tunes than declarative talk.> Sonic samples can pass between populations of humpbacks that never physically meet, as has been documented in songs moving from west to east, out across the Pacific. The jingles — pop songs — travel from Antarctic–Australian waters, to the calls of humpbacks grouped up near New Caledonia, Tonga, Samoa, to around the Cook Islands and French Polynesia.> roughly once every three years, an event takes place that alters the song structures entirely. Scientific observers have deemed these events 'cultural revolutions'. When a cultural revolution sweeps across the humpback population, the whales' compositions are stripped of showy details, and simplified — the animals switch to what the scientists call 'revolutionary songs'.> A solar storm humans can't feel — which we only have eyes to observe second-hand as shimmers of color in the night, and which our ears might take in, absent-mindedly, as the sound of lost birds circling — that far-off ejection of sun can, nonetheless, migrate a geomagnetic mountain. It can tremble that mountain like a jelly, or re-outline it temporarily. A strong sun storm might altogether dissolve such an undersea mountain