THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An awe-inspiring portrait of the mysterious world
beneath the waves and the men and women who seek to uncover its secrets.
______________________________________________ 'Masterful and mesmerizing . . . an
irresistible mix of splendid scholarship heart-stopping adventure writing and vivid visceral
prose.' Sy Montgomery author of Soul of an Octopus 'Fantastical and forbidding' Washington
Post 'A fascinating history' Time 'Casey's descriptions of the shimmeringly strange life
teeming below the waves capture her wonder and ravishment in prose that morphs into poetry . .
. Entralling' Boston Globe ________________________________________ For all of human history
the deep ocean has been a source of fear and fascination an unknowable realm that evokes a
singular compelling question: what's down there? But now cutting-edge technologies are
allowing scientists and explorers to discover this strange and exotic underworld: a place of
soaring mountains smouldering volcanoes and valleys 7 000 feet deeper than Everest is high. A
realm long thought to be devoid of life is in fact a vibrant new world home to pink
gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long creatures that breathe iron
and communicate through their skin ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live
for half a millennium. In The Underworld Susan Casey traverses the globe joining scientists
and explorers on dives to the deepest places on the planet. She interviews the marine
geologists marine biologists and oceanographers as they uncover this vast unseen realm. And
she discovers the mind-blowing complexity and ecological importance of the abyssal ocean and
the quadrillions of creatures who live in its depths.
