Abstract

An awe-inspiring and panoramic investigation into the hidden world of the deep sea - a mysterious, unforgiving landscape whose secrets radically revise our understanding of life on earth.

The deep sea is one of our planet’s last frontiers. For most of human history, it has been a remote realm shrouded in obscurity. But here, where the light cannot reach, lies a strange, wonderful and breathtaking world, teeming with scientific marvels and lessons for the future of life on this planet.

In The Dark Frontier, marine microbiologist and explorer Jeffrey Marlow plunges us into the ocean’s depths and invites us to witness close-up encounters with its hidden brilliance. Translucent shrimp dance through sulphureous vents, crabs stretch twelve feet from claw to claw and the eerie chalk-white towers of the ‘Lost City’ loom. Immersive and illuminating, Marlow’s journeys reveal alarming warning signs as well: we are irrevocably changing the deep sea before we have even had a chance to understand it.

This expansive book offers crucial and surprising insights into the ways in which the twinned forces of exploration and exploitation have shaped our relationship with the ocean. It shows how life can thrive in even the most extreme conditions, and reveals critical links between the deep sea and life on land. The Dark Frontier expands our understanding of biological possibilities - and our responsibilities - on Earth and beyond.

Contribution

Role: Interview

  • Glen Wright, a senior researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, was following the EIA negotiations closely. “There were often two very clear ideological options, ” he explained, “to pick column A or column B for most things: ambitious or not.” From one IGC to the next, the text drifted inexorably toward column B, the more lax formulation. “I was really hopeful that this could be a way to properly institutionalize impact assessments, to really do it right, ” Wright said. “It looks like a lot of states have just sort of dropped interest in that.” The final EIA text wasn’t what a lot of conservation-minded observers wanted, but it was better than nothing. Countries would do their own assessments, and feedback from the global community was nonbinding, but the transparency, perhaps, would engender some degree of accountability.
  • The High Seas Treaty also serves as a victory for multilateralism in an increasingly fractured world. “Society, basically, is just layers of consensus, ” Glen Wright, the EIA researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations, said during one sleepless night at the UN. “Like the consensus that these agreements matter. They carry a moral and political weight that resonates far into the future.”