June 21, 2021 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing “The Deep,” an essay on deep-sea mining and the threat it poses to fragile deep-sea ecosystems. Reading it, I learned about extraordinary “bioluminescent creatures” that live in the vast darkness at the bottom of the sea, creatures such as the stoplight loose jaw (“a fish with photon-emitting organs under each eye”), the humpback blackdevil (“sports a shiny lure that dangles off its forehead like a crystal from a chandelier”), and the giant red mysid (“a hamster-size crustacean” that “spews streams of blue sparkles from nozzles near its mouth”). I also learned about hydrothermal vents. Kolbert writes,

Some of the seas’ most extraordinary animals live around hydrothermal vents—the oceanic equivalents of hot springs. Through cracks in the seafloor, water comes in contact with the earth’s magma; the process leaves it superheated and loaded with dissolved minerals. (At some vents, the water reaches a temperature of more than seven hundred degrees.) As the water rises and cools, the minerals precipitate out to form crenellated, castlelike structures.

Kolbert is a superb nature-describer. She says of the scaly-foot snail: “It’s the only animal known to build its shell with iron, and around its foot it sports a fringe of iron plates that looks a bit like a flamenco skirt.”

Kolbert’s piece flags a serious concern that deep-sea mining will wreck the ocean floor “before many of the most marvellous creatures living there are even identified.”