internet rabbit holes 2: Our Wives Under the Sea
Lit List No. 15, where the wives aren't the creepiest thing down there
Over the summer, I read Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, a literary fiction debut that I’d been anticipating for months. I love deep sea shit, even though my fascination is partly terror, so a sapphic romance about one character returning to her wife after a deep sea scientific research trip goes awry is extremely up my alley.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t finish the book and immediately wish it had been more Planet Earth and less mysterious, literary fiction, but after sitting with the book for longer than one minute I realized I truly enjoyed it for exactly what it was — even though I will be wondering what the fuck The Centre was up to until my dying breath.
So I’ll enthusiastically encourage you to read it (here’s my insta review, which tells you basically nothing because my reviews these days are just vibes), but in case you’re like me and need a scientific explanation for everything to feel like the world is right-side up, I’ll do the Planet Earth-ing for you with the second installment of my internet rabbit holes.
This is chaotic, not very thorough, and most certainly contains incorrect information where I haven’t bothered to verify things properly. I did my best to include links for your further exploration. Please don’t come for me if you’re a marine biologist.
First, I am trash with money and paid to get the UK cover shipped here because …look for yourself (I know a lot of work goes into cover art and I’m not saying the US cover is bad, but the difference surprised me). The UK cover gives you a better idea of what you’re getting into, and the US cover makes you think the book is set on Mars.
With either cover, Julia Armfield seems very cool. Her debut book was a short story collection, Salt Slow, and it’s pretty rare that a publishing company will go with short stories before a novel, so that feels like a testament to her talent. I never finished it, but for my own distracted reasons, not because I wasn’t enjoying it. I’ll get back to it later this year.
While I could see the water thing becoming a tired trope if it continues for her next few books, I love the cohesiveness of a fixation like this. She explains herself a bit in a LitHub article from earlier this year, which opens with the line: “I’ve been thinking about lesbians and the water lately, which is very fashionable of me.” I can’t wait for what Armfield writes next.
interviews
reviews
From actual book reviewers, not just whatever I’m doing on instagram.
The Guardian (one of the only meh reviews from The Professionals)
Onto the deep sea deep dive content:
zones of depth
Armfield divides her book into five sections — one for each of the five zones: the sunlight zone (or epipelagic), the twilight zone (or mesopelagic), the midnight zone (bathypelagic), the abyssal zone (abyssopelagic), and the hadal zone (or hadopelagic).
For creepy purposes, I’m mostly interested in the hadal zone. You know it’s going to be pretty metal just from the name, derived from Hades himself. Considering that the hadal zone only exists in the trenches below ~20,000 feet (the official depth parameters are disputed), the underworld comparison is pretty apt. It wasn’t even discovered until the 1950s, and what tipped scientists off was a “distinct shift in lifeforms."1 Because the hadal zone is just the trenches, there isn't actually much area to it.
lifeforms
Somehow, life does exist in the hadal zone despite a complete lack of sunlight. This is so remarkable because of how important sunlight is to most ocean life, which relies on the photosynthesis of single-cell organisms like phytoplankton.2 Deep down, in the absence of sunlight, nutrients come from carbon and sediment (called marine snow, cool and gross), so you know the lifeforms are gonna be weird. Many don't have functional eyeballs because there's no need for them in the pitch black, and gigantism exists here where it doesn't anywhere else on the planet — the stuff of nightmares, I say gleefully.
There are about 400 known species3 existing in the hadal zone, mostly a lot of the -pods (isopods, amphipods, gastropods, etc.) and species of sea cucumbers. There aren’t really fish down this far because of the extreme pressure and temperatures, though they increase in number and variety once you ascend to the abyssal zone — just as terrifying and dark, only not in a trench.
I think what gets me the most about the abyssal and hadal zones is that they are ancient. Literally, in the case of its animals, who are so well-adapted to their environments that it’s likely they’ve been evolving down there for a long, long time.
The evolutionary adaptations are actually kind of incredible, and luckily wikipedia has a whole page on deep sea fish if you’re curious about their shared characteristics and scientists’ best guesses on why and how they survive.
And of course, there are the scary creatures that are more misunderstood than anything:
the giant isopod, arguably the creepiest just because it looks like a giant bug, but it’s actually a crustacean.
the giant squid, a great example of aforementioned gigantism at anywhere from 30ish to 40ish feet long and the animal most subject to Hollywood’s creative license.
The giant squid does have a natural predator, though: sperm whales.4 Little is known about their co-existence, which is the theme of most ocean animals, but sperm whales are pretty cool — they're one of the world's largest predators, and as evidenced by their giant squid battles, they can dive quite deep by whale standards.
The bloody-belly comb jelly, which is beautiful! So much so that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has a YouTube video that’s just 12 hours of it swimming around with ambient music playing in the background.
Thanks to Finding Nemo, the anglerfish is one of the more well-known deep sea fish. They’re the ones that lure in their prey with some impressive bioluminescence and what is essentially a built-in fishing pole.
As is obvious in the year 2022, humans are a far greater threat to sea life, both deep sea and otherwise, than it’ll ever be to us. I don’t think it can be stressed enough how important the ocean ecosystem is to Earth’s survival.
deepest dives
ha ha ha
The deepest point in the oceans discovered so far is the Challenger Deep, which is named after the submarine that discovered it5 and located in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean. The Challenger Deep is around 35,700-35,800 feet deep (10,900-ish meters), which for context means that it is significantly deeper than Mount Everest is tall — the latter is around 29,000 feet (or about 8,800 meters)6, which means the Challenger Deep has over a mile on Mount Everest.
The Brits found the Challenger Deep first, all the way back in the late 1800s, but the immense pressure at those depths made exploratory missions, either manned or unmanned, virtually impossible until the aid of modern technology. The first crewed vessel to reach the depths of Challenger Deep was Trieste, manned by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960, who had to have been shitting it as one of their Plexiglas windows cracked during descent, and they still stayed on the ocean floor for 20 minutes before ascending.
Sometimes I ask myself why deep sea explorers aren’t considered as cool as astronauts — even though the latter certainly need more all-around fitness, I honestly don’t know if I’d be more scared to go to space or the Mariana Trench.
And just like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are ruining going to space, we had James Cameron to ruin going to the depths of the ocean in his Deepsea Challenger, the second voyage to reach the Challenger Deep. That was a joke, much respect to you Mr. Cameron, but some aspects of this mission were hilariously and painfully capitalistic — like the submarine wearing a functioning Rolex the entire damn time (#sponcon), and our most reliable account of descent and ascent times and depths are from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s tweets aboard his yacht.
Since then, the DSV Limiting Factor has made several successful dives, most recently in 2021. This $37 million submarine in itself is impressive, being the only one to reach the deepest point in all five oceans, though you have probably already guessed that at that price, it’s owned by an adrenaline junkie private equity bro.
And for $750,000, you can hitch a ride on the DSV Limiting Factor — just you and Victor, locked in a submarine for hours — and visit the Mariana Trench yourself. For that person in your life who already has everything and Katy Perry fans alike, viewing the world’s most remote plastic bag is an experience you can’t put a price tag on.
submarine accidents
My most beloved internet rabbit holes are usually about disasters, both natural and of the equipment-failing variety. A submarine expedition gone wrong was a huge draw to Our Wives Under the Sea, so I’ve been searching for real-life incidents too.
The most well-known deep sea accidents involve oil rigs such as the Byford Dolphin in 1983 and Deepwater Horizon in 2010, which isn’t all that surprising considering profits are involved that would compromise safety just like every industry that relies on manual labor.
As for submarine incidents, here’s a list of all of them since 2000 for your perusing (lists like this are my favorite thing about Wikipedia). A notable early one was the Johnson Sea Link accident in 1973, the circumstances of which — the sub essentially got stuck in a shipwreck — led to safety developments for future dives. The New York Times has its original article on the accident archived online.
Nearly all modern submarine accidents are military involved, as you’d expect, and none of them were caused by a giant octopus or The Meg, but the number and nature of wrecks does highlight the potential danger of submarines. I don’t think they’re anymore dangerous than any other military vessel, but our fear of the unknown ocean ups the stakes, much like how flying is so much safer than driving but it’s the former we’re scared of. The most recent sub wreck in Wikipedia archives was the USS Connecticut in October 2021, and while it’s not all that dramatic of a crash, a bunch of people were relieved of duty, so there’s still some tea.
And there’s the shipwreck of the Andrea Doria, a Titanic-like luxury transatlantic passenger liner, whose mystery has lured many divers and also killed a whopping 16 of them. While it’s not a submarine accident and I don’t want to get into shipwrecks here, the eerie Bermuda Triangle-esque siren call earns it a mention.
I’m still not going to talk about shipwrecks, but a cool fact is that the deepest one is four miles down off the coast of the Philippines. WWII ship The U.S.S. Samuel B Roberts was discovered just this past summer, and none other than our wealthy submarine dude Victor Vescovo led the expedition.
misc.
A list of deep sea scary movies from screenrant (I’ve only seen The Meg and 47 Meters Down in addition to Jaws, which is just obvious).
A Spotify playlist for the book, not by me, and there are several others if this one doesn’t do it for you (just search our wives under the sea):
Eight horror books about the ocean, from Book Riot
The good people of r/suggestmeabook coming through with some deep sea exploration books
OK, well. Thanks for reading, or scrolling to the bottom, even though I think this exceeds the email limit. If this entire newsletter gave you the ick, you might have thalassophobia, or you might just be having a visceral reaction to me writing this.
If you’re here and feel so inclined:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadal_zone#:~:text=The%20hadal%20zone%2C%20also%20known,%2C%20topographic%20V%2Dshaped%20depressions.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-biological-productivity-of-the-ocean-70631104/
https://sciencing.com/list-hadal-zone-animals-8119649.html
https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/invertebrates/giant-squid
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/oceandepth.html#:~:text=Challenger%20Deep%20is%20approximately%2010%2C935,of%20the%20trench%20in%201875.
https://www.britannica.com/place/Mount-Everest