Ocean's Depths

Those engaged with the ocean in various ways like to point out that the planet is covered mostly by water. Historians mirror the general population in their overall benign neglect of the sea. When the author began trying to write a history of the deep sea, few historians had noticed the ocean. Tracklessness, opacity and vast scale are physical aspects of the ocean that are identified, to some degrees, relative to human senses and scale. The ocean's scale presents a spatial challenge to historians, who are most comfortable with explicitly defined units of time and place. Oceans have been perceived as ahistoric but, of course, they are susceptible to history. Oceans have natural history, geological history, and evolutionary history. Yet some characteristics of the ocean defined by the present project as "extreme" seem not entirely accounted for by the methods, questions, and assumptions of environmental history. Not all historians would agree that parts of the ocean devoid of resources useful to people even deserve historical attention.