Charting the Abyss

Seventy-one percent of our planet is ocean, and we have a reliable map of less than a third of what lies beneath it.

How can a world this familiar still hide most of its own floor? And how did anyone learn what we do know?

For thousands of years, the bottom of the sea was the one place nobody could see. Sailors lowered lead on a rope and wrote down what ran out. Telegraph engineers bet fortunes on a plateau no human had ever visited. A naval officer, lamed in a stagecoach accident, turned a storeroom of forgotten ship's logs into the first chart of the Atlantic floor. A wooden warship stripped of her cannon sailed around the world, hauling up living creatures from miles below the waves, and lowered a rope into a hole more than five miles deep.

Then the echoes began.

Charting the Abyss is the true story of the people who mapped the bottom of the sea before anyone could look, and it reads like the best kind of adventure, because it is one. You will follow a Navy transport captain who left his depth recorder running through a world war and noticed mountains with their tops sliced flat. You will watch a woman at a drafting table, kept off the research ships that gathered her data, spot a crack running down the middle of the Atlantic, and learn what she was told when she said so. She was right. Her map helped prove that the surface of the Earth moves.

Inside, you will discover:
• how a single night in 1929 broke a dozen telegraph cables and exposed underwater avalanches
• why the Cold War turned depth itself into a secret
• how stripes of magnetism hidden in the rock settled one of the great arguments in the history of science
• how satellites now weigh the ocean's bumps from orbit
• why the race to map the rest by 2030 is still wide open

Written for curious readers who love a true story told well, this is narrative history with the pace of an expedition: vivid scenes, real people, hard numbers, and a mystery that is still unsolved.

If you have ever looked at the sea and wondered what is down there, this book will show you how we found out, and how much is left to find.

Take the first sounding. Once you start reading, the line will not stop running out.