Deep

The deep sea remains Earth’s final frontier. And as James Nestor reveals, adventurous scientists’ current quests to solve the mysteries of the ocean are transforming not only our knowledge of the planet and its creatures, but also our understanding of the human body and mind. Over the course of the book, Nestor journeys from the ocean’s surface — where the extreme sport of freediving pushes the boundaries of human physical endurance — to its greatest, most otherworldly depth, 35,000 feet below sea level at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Along the way he finds “telepathic” corals that synchronize their blooming even though they’re hundreds of miles apart, octopus species that thrive in 300-degree water, sharks that swim in unerringly straight lines through pitch blackness, and, most illuminating of all, the human pioneers whose discoveries are expanding our definition of what is possible in the natural world, and in ourselves.