FRONTIER BELOW

Sub-titled 'The Past, Present and Future of Our Quest to Go Deeper Underwater', here is a journey to the bottom of the ocean and the future of our planet. The first divers to venture into the sea held their breath and splashed beneath the surface. Over the centuries they invented wooden diving bells, clumsy diving suits, and unwieldy contraptions in attempts to go deeper and stay longer under water and push the boundaries of human endurance. Each advance was fraught with danger as people had to survive the crushing weight of water and the deadly physiological effects of breathing compressed air. Plunging into the narrow trenches between the tectonic plates of the Earth's crust, they eventually reached the bottom of the ocean in the same decade that men first walked on the moon. It would be 52 years before anyone returned to these depths, but today many countries are developing drones and submersibles capable of reaching the ocean's deepest point. Once a mission for its own sake, now there are more tangible rewards - the ocean economy with ocean-based industries combined with the assets and resources provided by marine ecosystems - is set to double in size in the coming decades and there is much to be gained from what lies beneath. We meet inventors such as Sir Edmund Halley, Auguste Piccard and Jacques Cousteau who popularised recreational Scuba diving. And of course so recently we have seen the tragic loss of the OceanGate Titan submersible. It was Otis Barton who in 1928 designed the first diving tank that would go to depths suspended by a cable who explained why a steel sphere rather than a cylindrical shape would be ideal. He set a record of over 3,000 feet in his sphere in 1934. These superb facts are woven into a fascinating story, so plunge in. 298pp, 16 pages of colour images.