BELOW THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

An entertaining voyage to the bottom of the sea.

In her first book, Widder, a veteran marine scientist and co-founder of the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, offers a captivating, watery-world personal memoir about exploring bioluminescence (“pure magic of living light”) and an urgent plea to protect the world’s largest ecosystem. As she laments, we’re “managing to destroy the ocean before we even know what’s in it.” The author was hooked immediately after learning about bioluminescence. In 1982, on her first ocean expedition, she saw a vast array of “outlandish” bioluminescent sea creatures “about which most people knew almost nothing.” Since then, Widder’s career has been filled with dramatic highlights. On a 1984 expedition, she took her first deep water dive, to 800 feet, in the Wasp, a 2,000-pound metal suit in which she “oscillated like a tea bag on a string.” She was “awestruck and baffled” by the lights she saw at the edge of darkness. Her second dive (1,831 feet) set a world depth record for the Wasp. Widder followed up that feat with a single-person submersible dive in Deep Rover, a 3.6 ton, “five-foot-diameter acrylic sphere with five-inch thick walls.” On that dive, she filmed phenomenon never seen before in such detail. “I was sitting,” she writes, “in the middle of a bioluminescent minefield!” After experiencing a harrowing near-death event due to a leaking sphere, with U.S. Navy support, a dive to 2,420 feet yielded further amazing discoveries, and another dive undertaken with the Discovery Channel and Fidel Castro’s support resulted in a TV documentary. A special camera she developed allowed her to fulfill a goal of her lifetime, to be the first to film “the world’s most famous invertebrate,” the massive giant squid, “in its natural habitat.” Widder’s enthusiastic, joyful memoir amply describes the “wonder and exhilaration of discovery.”

Inspiring for science-loving readers and environmentalists young and old.