Sea-Shaped

The largest ecosystems on Earth lie farther than 3,000 metres beneath the surface of the sea. Ranging across some seventy per cent of the ocean floor – or about half the planet – are habitats usually called ‘abyssal plains’. The name stirs a curious mix of terror and tedium, as if what’s actually scary about the bottom of the world is its unfathomable monotony. Not so: high-resolution sonar shows that the abyssal seabed is a good deal more heterogeneous than common sense has tended to suggest: rocky substrates punctuate the plains much oftener than thought, and this newfound structural variety implies a correspondingly underrated degree of biodiversity. Far from featureless, the deep biosphere is shapely – and lively – in ways science is just beginning to understand. 

It is possible to describe the entire project of Western marine knowledge as an attempt to convert the formless void of premodern lore into an ever more finely delineated – and ever more scrutable – object. ‘We know so little about the ocean,’ reflects the oceanographer Sylvia Earle. ‘Only about five percent has been seen, let alone explored. Anyone looking for new frontiers, think: “ocean”.’ It bears emphasising, at the same time, that this logic is not universal. ‘Our creation story,’ explains the Cook Islander marine biologist and environmental activist Teina Rongo, ‘is that the bottom of the ocean is where life began.’ For some traditions, the ‘discovery’ of the deeps’ vivacious textures may be unlikely to come as a surprise. Still less impressed, presumably, would be the sponges, soft corals, polychaete worms, and other creatures who have been getting on with life, at depth, for millions of years. 

With Deep Water: The World in the Ocean, James Bradley aims not only to ‘give shape’ to the sea’s ‘immensity and fluid multiplicity’, but to tell us how Earth’s salt waters have themselves ‘shaped the world we now share’. Bradley’s novels and nonfiction comprise one of the most significant marine oeuvres of our day. Here, he has set himself the thrilling and frequently troubling tasks of both characterising the ocean’s pivotal involvement in planetary and human histories, and tracing the complex paths through which those histories encroach upon the present and future. ‘The ocean,’ he writes, ‘provides a way of thinking.’ Along this way lies a confrontation with all the manifold ‘currents and tidal forces that have borne us here’: the ‘waves of migration and encounter and exploitation’, the ‘centuries of extraction and colonial violence’, and – not least – the ‘continuities and connections’ that lend form to this swarm. 

What Bradley would have us recognise is that interflowing histories of colonialism, capitalism, and climate disaster are not only visible through but ‘embodied’ by the sea. This is true insofar as the ocean bears the scars of pollution, overfishing, and global warming – and it pertains no less to the ocean’s indispensable contributions to the ‘fluid patterns’ that have defined the world’s becoming. The sea is Deep Water’s subject, therefore, in at least two senses: it is the focus of the book’s searching curiosity, and it also wields formidable agency within the narratives Bradley builds. Moreover, in both these senses, it is a subject perpetually on the move. New information is forever revising what we know of oceanic nature, and anthropogenic changes are transforming marine systems, from the abyssal plains to the encroaching foreshore. Giving shape to oceans that have shaped our world – and that are in the process of being utterly reshaped – Deep Water furnishes us a substrate for settling upon, briefly, so that we might absorb a few of the sea’s meanings before some coming surge carries them, and us, finally away. 

What is the ocean doing? The question dates back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1798), but with Bradley’s book at hand it feels urgently modern. Early on, Deep Water informs us that as prehistoric human societies extended their coverage of planetary space, ‘the ocean helped create increasingly complex networks of trade and cultural interchange, enabling the development of new forms of social organisation’. This sort of claim might pass without remark through the pages of any number of recent ‘big histories’. From Bradley, however, it arrives as a token of a thoroughgoingly marine vision of human and planetary pasts. Oceanic thinking, he writes, ‘dissolves’ the world map as we know it, and ‘reforms’ our senses of space and time via coordinates that are first of all liquid, not terrestrial. This involves attending to watery surfaces, to be sure, but no less to volumes. ‘Human life,’ he tells us, ‘is inextricably connected to the deep.’  

For Deep Water, premodern connections between human and marine subjects are mostly uninflected by moral drama. This changes sharply around the middle of the second millennium CE, the same era that Bradley identifies with the rise of European empire and – uncoincidentally – the beginning of the Anthropocene. Suddenly, seas that had been involved in such apparently benign affairs as helping create trade networks find themselves caught up in projects that will prove earth-shattering. Regarding the Atlantic slave trade, the devastation of indigenous societies by European invaders, and all the ‘cycles of exploitation and violence that have underpinned the transformation of the planet’, Bradley suggests that we not shrink from including ship-bearing waters among the gallery of the complicit. ‘None of this,’ he insists, ‘would have been possible without the oceans.’ 

In the hands of a less sensitive writer, the idea of the ocean’s potential culpability for historical wrongs might collapse into triviality. But Bradley is genuinely committed to examining, and even to inhabiting, the sea’s chequered position in the story of modernity. When he observes that ‘sea routes connected continents and cultures, allowing Europeans to keep pushing outwards into new frontiers’, he is showing himself willing to take seriously the sometimes unpleasant shapes wrought by oceanic subjects. Such vexations are arguably too rarely contemplated by the growing cast of researchers and theorists whose work responds to what Amitav Ghosh calls ‘the task of imaginatively restoring agency and voice to nonhumans’. What makes Bradley’s approach so appealing is its unstated ethic of staying with the troubles, as well as the ‘wondrous complexity’, of oceans that ‘have shaped the world we now share.’  

Bradley is cognisant, moreover, that a spirit of frontierism can impinge upon intellectual expansions as well as literal ones. ‘The ocean’s immensity,’ he states, ‘allows us to see past ourselves and intuit a larger frame of reference.’ The same seas that made European imperialism possible permit Deep Water and its readers the planetary perspective required to truly make sense of the predicament we’re in, not least insofar as that predicament has been determined by empire. This tension, which functions at times like a kind of feedback loop, is the discomfiting dynamic at the book’s core. By declining to resolve this ‘double-visioning’ into some more settled perspective, Bradley withholds the sort of consolation that some readers may seek. But the dissatisfaction is the point. To reckon, oceanically, with ‘the way we are shaped by the world around us as much as it is shaped by us’ is to pursue heightened intimacy with bodies, lives, and histories that are bound to disturb as well as – or more than – edify. 

Bradley’s ambivalent oceanity deepens as he negotiates a relationship with the knowledge practices he gathers under the sign of ‘European science’. One mesmerising sequence sees him becoming acquainted with the Dominica-based Cetacean Translation Initiative (‘Project CETI’), a group studying the patterns of clicks – ‘codas’ – that male sperm whales tend to make while hanging out with one another in surface waters. As they ‘unravel’ those codas, the researchers at Project CETI formulate theories of whaly sociability – and even of ‘cultural evolution’ – that remind us of science’s capacity for accentuating the planet’s wonders. But however keenly and lucidly he reports from the vanguard of Western scientific discovery, Bradley remains admirably aware of the epistemological limitations, as well as the historical sins, of its endeavours.  

A sense for those limits is occasionally best articulated by science itself. One of Bradley’s interlocutors at Project CETI, a biologist named Shane Gero, acknowledges that it may prove impossible to translate sperm whale codas smoothly into terms of human understanding. Marine creatures inhabit their world – better, worlds – otherwise, and the more we learn about them, the more redoubtable their difference becomes. ‘Many fish,’ as Bradley points out, ‘have sensory dimensions quite alien to our human experience of the world.’ This is not only a matter of physiological variety: these are ‘other ways of being’.  

In drawing attention to the incalculably diverse perceptual faculties of ocean life, Bradley invites us to put down the tools of ‘reductive analysis’ and linger, instead, with the uncertain ‘beauty’ of that life’s expressions. I thought of the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, whose fieldwork in the Amazon rainforest alerted him to the ‘perspectival aesthetic’ of the Quechua Runa, who imagine the ‘points of view of other organisms’ and thus recognise those organisms as animate ‘selves’. Deep Water gestures toward a comparable regard for the immersed perspectives of toothed whales, fishes, and so on. Theirs are heterogeneous ways of being that it would be foolish, and possibly violent, to pretend to fully comprehend – but that we might do well to humbly and playfully approximate. 

If the sea is ‘alive with meaning’, it would appear that some part – perhaps the overwhelming majority – of such meaning is bound to remain at best imperfectly intelligible to human interlocutors. For a book devoted to illuminating entwinements between the oceanic and the anthropic, the prospect of irreducible unlikeness can seem to throw up an intriguing difficulty. Bradley leans in. ‘To contemplate strangeness and wonder,’ he contends, ‘is to begin to understand our place in the world very differently, to be reminded that we are not separate, or different, but part of a much larger system of impossible magnificence and complexity.’ This is an ethos of accepting, and feeling, oneself situated among worlds of sometimes incommensurable distinction: a kind of eco-cosmopolitanism across the waterline, to adapt a term from the literary theorist Ursula Heise. The ocean is for Bradley an exceptionally powerful encouragement to such a sensibility, affording ‘a way of imagining and even inhabiting different ways of being, of acknowledging the intermingling of our bodies and lives with both planetary systems and the intimate, microscopic life that surrounds and permeates us.’   

When the deeps drive Bradley to marvel at ‘the true scale and complexity of our planet’s biosphere’, we remember that he is not the first sea-goer, ancient or modern, to encounter the sublime. Here, that sentiment responds to the ocean’s astonishing ecologies, but also its ‘staggering’ role in histories of colonial violence and the world economy. It responds, furthermore, to Deep Water’s many revelations of submerged horrors, including the ‘hundreds of thousands of tonnes of nuclear waste’ that moulder upon the seabed and the ‘toxic legacies of human industry written into the bodies of ocean creatures’. ‘Repression’, wrote the poet Marianne Moore, ‘is not the most obvious characteristic of the sea; / the sea is a collector, quick to return a rapacious look’. For Bradley, the question is not whether but when, and in what form, the ocean will return rapacity’s harms. ‘The deep’, he avows, ‘is not a place of forgetting’. How to best interpret its memories is a pressing and confounding problem, and it is one that is only getting harder as Earth’s seas become rapidly, and perhaps irrevocably, transformed.

Phenomenally grand in scale, mostly unavailable to human examination, literally constituted by flux: the ocean has never been anything other than an unwieldy subject. One of Deep Water’s latter chapters drives this point home through a bravura investigation of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing practices, especially as they collide with marine ecologies and maritime economies in West Africa. As Bradley makes rivetingly clear, such practices are predicated upon multiple obfuscations. The Global North subsidises its industrialised high-seas fleets out of all proportion to their real returns, disguising the fisheries’ actual (and ever-deepening) non-viability. At the same time, dubious approaches to ‘flagging’ offending vessels make it hard to unravel the states, corporations, and individuals truly responsible for them. Those vessels are frequently crewed, meanwhile, by workers striving unfreely and invisibly upon waters that flow well beyond the media’s compass of concern.  

If the sea’s shapes have always been – and sometimes been made – tricky to discern, anthropogenic impacts threaten to leave them totally unrecognisable. The conservation scientist Jessica Meeuwig is Bradley’s key interlocutor on the topic of fisheries. ‘We’re seeing,’ she tells him, ‘a complete simplification of ocean ecosystems.’ The waters she foresees are ‘diminished, depleted, exhausted’. They are increasingly inhabited by creatures out of place, such as the Southern Ocean’s colossal populations of krill, which blue whales are already having greater and greater trouble locating. Southern waters are also undergoing what Bradley describes as an epochal disruption in the ‘annual rhythm’ of Antarctic sea ice. ‘The ice,’ he writes, ‘has shifted to a new state.’ These are intensities of alteration that the word ‘change’ probably fails to express. ‘The moment we are hurtling into right now,’ avers Bradley, is one of ‘discontinuity’ – nothing short of a ‘schism between past and future’. Little wonder that the whales’ recollection of nourishing waters is letting them down. In an unprecedented ocean, their memories no longer apply. 

These oceans are part what of what makes Earth singularly, miraculously conducive to the development of complex life: a ‘goldilocks planet’, as the geologists Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams might have it. But Earth’s identity is becoming disordered as it is thrust into cycles of irreversible change, and the book is haunted by premonitions of systemic desolation. (The ‘horrifying hellscape’ that is Venus advertises one worst-case scenario.) On a trip to the Cocos Islands, in the eastern Indian Ocean, Bradley has the distressing experience of visiting a beach so polluted by plastic waste as to be effectively enveloped by it. As the ecologist Jennifer Lavers explains, the ‘biofilm’ of pollution that covers the strand is also making it unnaturally warm – not just cluttering and poisoning the ecosystem, but cooking it. Loosed upon the sea and everything its waters touch, our rubbish is doing more than making a mockery of our pretensions to sustainability. It is reshaping the world. 

Bradley’s descriptions of the physical chaos being wrought upon marine processes and lives are startlingly luminous. But what makes Deep Water more than the sum of its chapters is its sense of what Earth’s ‘dangerously unstable new state’ implies for the capacities, and the thresholds, of oceanic thought. Bradley makes the memorable point that just as early human communities took shape along the shore, so too was human imagination formed at the ocean’s edge. For European science, sea-shapes have been emerging into view, in every bit of stunning detail, at the same time that those shapes have been subjected to transformation, if not elimination. This dynamic is as upsetting as it is weird. It demands the attention of writers willing to scrupulously confront the consequences, for observation, interpretation, and speculation, of a planet growing ‘almost unimaginable’. It is in this regard that Bradley goes beyond the vital work of faithfully illustrating the seas’ shapes, however dazzling or demoralising they prove. He is helping us all to witness the new formations, and indeed deformations, that an oceanic ‘lens’ renders hazily visible – and to feel our way forward, insecurely but committedly, with waters that we had better allow to reshape us in turn, while we still have some agency left.

Toward the end of Deep Water, Bradley reflects:  

This is a disquieting and necessary truth. It is one that may be nowhere so apparent as offshore, where – to cite just one, exceptionally terrifying instance – the conversion of West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier from ice into water advances at speeds unheralded by even the most alarming predictions. As it melts, this ‘Doomsday’ glacier reveals to Bradley ‘the rushing collision of the human and the planetary’, as well as ‘the connection between the heedless consumption of the wealthy few and the dislocation and displacement of the rest, and the imbalances of power and corporate greed that allow that to continue’. These are liquid shapes that we are still too little used to detecting, and that it is incumbent upon us to intently trace, no matter how difficult that task may be. (On May 20, 2024, scientists at the University of California, Irvine published fresh evidence of ‘seawater intrusions occurring at tidal frequencies over many kilometres beneath the grounded ice of Thwaites,’ rendering it ‘more vulnerable to melting from a warmer ocean than anticipated’.) 

As an appeal for historical consciousness amidst climate emergency, Deep Water joins the likes of Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2022). As a clear-eyed reckoning with the plight of the twenty-first-century biosphere, it recalls Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014). As an ode to oceans as both foundational to and alien from human existence, it carries on the work of Rachel Carson’s classic trilogy of marine natural histories: Under the Sea Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955). As the expression of a career, and a life, spent carefully heeding what seas mean, what they remember, what worlds they enable, and what they foretell, Deep Water is its own unique synthesis. For marine thinkers serious about contending – from our place at ‘the beginning’ of ‘an Age of Emergency’ – with the pasts that lie ‘in the ocean’, Bradley’s book is a thoroughgoing challenge, and a boon.    

Thousands of metres underwater, Earth’s abyssal plains stretch vastly, and heterogeneously, across the ocean floor. Their textures are homes to marine lives of an abundance, and a diversity, that most of us are just beginning to credit. But as they begin to fall within the target of multinational capital, Earth’s biggest ecosystems grow susceptible to flattening of a new kind: thousands of metres’ depth may not shield the plains from seabed mining. Deep Water trains us to understand that no part of the ocean has been free from entanglement with human activity – and that this knowledge, instead of rendering us resigned to ever-more-depleted futures, might endow us with the awareness that we are already ineluctably immerged. Ours are the seas’ shapes. This paradoxical truth is the locus of grave concerns, and of what could be forms of hope. James Bradley is helping us feel them all.