Tag Archive for: Helen Scales

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What the Wild Sea Can Be | Helen Scales

 

Shortlisted for the 2025 Womens Prize for non-fiction, marine biologist Helen Scales’ exploration of the changing nature of our oceans, drawing on 20 years of research, attempts to answer the question of whether it’s possible to be hopeful about the future of the blue planet. “I set out to tread a path that combines pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will,” she writes. “I don’t want to shy away from the troubles, and at the same time I want readers to hope for, and demand, a better future.” The result is a lucid, beautifully-written and highly informed call to save the oceans upon which human life depends.

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The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed | Helen Scales

Brilliant Abyss Book Cover

 

The deep sea is the last, vast wilderness on the planet. For centuries, myth-makers and storytellers have concocted imaginary monsters of the deep, now scientists are looking there to find bizarre, unknown species, chemicals to make new medicines, and to gain a greater understanding of how this world works.

The Brilliant Abyss tells the story of our relationship with the deep sea – how we imagine, explore and exploit it. It captures the golden age of discovery we are currently in and looks back at the history of how we got here, while also looking forward to the unfolding new environmental disasters that are taking place miles beneath the waves, far beyond the public gaze.

Readers are taken on a chronological journey through humanity’s developing relationship with the deep sea. The Brilliant Abyss ends by looking forwards to humanity’s advancing impacts on the deep, including mining and pollution and what we can do about them.