The Bathysphere Book

A luminous and original account of the Bathysphere expeditions: the first ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly terrain more than 3000ft below sea level

11 June, 1930. On a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, a curious steel ball is lowered 3000 feet into the sea. Crumpled up inside, gazing through three-inch thick quartz windows, sits the famed zoologist William Beebe. With uncontrollable excitement, he watches as bizarre, never-before-seen creatures flit out of the inky blackness, illuminated by explosions of bioluminescence. He is the first person to witness this alien world.

Beebe's dives take place against the backdrop of a transforming and paradoxical America, home to ground-breaking scientists, eccentric adventurers, and eugenicist billionaires. Yet under the ocean's crushing pressure, scientific expectations disintegrate; the colour spectrum shatters into new dimensions; outlandish organisms thrive where no one expected them.

The Bathysphere Book blends research, storytelling, and poetic experiments, traveling through entangled histories of scientific discovery into the bottomless magic of the deep unknown.