Planet Zog, home of the Deathmaster stones? No, this is what a visitor from outer space would report as the typical Earth environment since two-thirds of the planet fits this description. But which two-thirds? The deep ocean floor.

There is only one way to explore the ocean floor directly – by deep-diving submersible. Few people have flown to the abyss in a submersible: to do so is remarkable both for its ordinariness and for its difference from the everyday world of the land. True, you need a submersible, but woolly pullovers not space suits. Yet in the course of a dive you visit parts of the Earth no human has ever seen.

Take the hot springs. In a single hot spring field, several hundred kilograms per second of water at up to 400 °C emerge from vents on the ocean floor. The water is rich in iron, copper, zinc and hydrogen sulphide. Mounds of sulphides precipitate as the vent water mixes with cold ocean water, and chemosynthetic bacteria extract energy by forcing the sulphide in the vent water to react with the oxygen in cold seawater. Animals, adapted to the hostile environment of the vents, live on the bacteria.

Productivity in these patches of life is as high as in a tropical rainforest. Whenever we explore a new part of the ocean, we find new life forms and new ways of exploiting the hot springs.

Cindy Van Dover is an ideal guide to this exotic landscape in her book In The Octopuses’ Garden. She did her PhD at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where I became involved with her quest to understand the blind vent shrimps that have enormous eyes (a paradox explained in this book), and shared with her and her supervisor Fred Grassle the discovery that these taste disgusting (and stay grey) when boiled.

Then, instead of following the normal academic route to a postdoc, she became convinced that she should pilot the submersible Alvin so that she could see more of the ocean floor. She succeeded in that quest and became the first PhD as well as the first woman to qualify as a submersible pilot.

Van Dover writes about these strange environments within the fine North American tradition of accessible natural science. But she also writes as a world-class creative scientist in her own right, and as a submersible pilot. The result is a compelling narrative of how she grew into a deep ocean scientist, what it is like to fly a sub to the ocean floor, and the science that drive the venture.

Other popular books on science do not reach the emotional intensity that Van Dover reaches here – her own history and her involvement with the science and the piloting. Science writers, as opposed to scientists who write, must always keep a judicious distance from the subject. Here that distance vanishes, and here is no stereotypical ham-fisted boffin prose either, but writing as good as you would find anywhere. Van Dover writes to inform and to inspire, and succeeds wonderfully. Buy this book. Read it. Become inspired.

Does science have to be ruled by the pro-faced Popperian peer reviewer?
Are we always testing hypotheses, refining models, deducting and inferring?
Or is there space in science still for adventure, for trying something because
no one has before, for plain exploration of the natural world? Why is it
now not respectable, even for scientists, to be simply excited by science
or technology? It used to be otherwise, before Dr Spock transformed to Dr
Strangelove. One or two people from that generation still survive, and are
still able to lose themselves in marvelling at the wonders of the world.
Allyn Vine is one of those. When he stops at my office door I brace myself
for whatever bright new way he has found to see the oceans, certain to be
unconventional, and usually unfundable, given the current pattern of grant
giving. He has not changed since 1956, as Victoria Kaharl’s book makes clear,
when he led the thrust to build a deep-ocean crewed manoeuvrable submersible
that became the 9-metre-long Alvin, called perhaps after him, perhaps after
the cartoon chipmunk, or just conceivably after both. Al Vine still retains
a bit of alvin the chipmunk about him.

Alvin turned out to be a vehicle for unexpected science, very much in
the Al Vine mould. Though all its activities are now filtered and controlled
by the dead hand of peer review, the unexpected still shows through. And
the science needs engineers, technicians, submersible pilots and seamen,
all working as a team, and all liable, through contact with this unusual
vehicle, to be people of strong character. Kaharl tells the story of Alvin,
its science and its people, in Water Baby, and the story is a fascinating
one.

Water Baby moves in broadly chronological fashion from Alvin’s conception
and construction, through its recovery of a sunken hydrogen bomb off the
coast of Spain, its first encounters with deep ocean animals, the FAMOUS
project and then to the amazing story of the hydrothermal vents of the mid-ocean
ridges. Kaharl lingers in her favourite areas: the appalling and grotesque
Lulu, Alvin’s first mother ship, the problems of women scientists in oceanogography
(still formidable even though Alvin now has its first woman pilot), the
near misses, narrow scrapes, hairy moments one to two miles below the sea
surface. She makes especially clear those crucial moments of discovery,
of which the most important must be the finding of hot springs on the ocean
floor.

We had expected there to be hot springs on the sea floor since the mid-1960s,
and pretty hot too, to judge from ore deposits found in fragments of ocean
floor thrust onto land. A fair amount of Alvin’s time had already been given
to searching for hot springs before the first active springs were found
in 1977. But no one had expected the hot springs to be surrounded by dense
clumps of animal life, the most productive square metres on the planet.
The geologists looking for sulphide ores found a whole new realm of life,
all depending on bacterial chemosynthesis fuelled by the chemical contrast
between the vent waters rich in hydrogen sulphide, methane and hydrogen
and the oxygen-bearing water of the deep ocean.

Here are giant tube worms which contain large organs full of bacteria,
and exist by bacterial symbiosis. They have no means of feeding any other
way. Clams, mussels and snails also contain symbiotic bacteria. Some species
of shrimp, by contrast, eat bacterial-coated sulphides and have great eye-like
organs with which to sense the hot water. And these have been studied so
far in few places on the ocean floor. What else may be down there? Will
the limits of our imagination be stretched yet further?

In Water Baby the excitement, the wonder of the science, comes through
most clearly, even though the details of the science are not always exactly
correct. And Kaharl also conveys the intensity of the struggle that keeps
Alvin going, through funding droughts, political scepticism and technical
improvisation.

At sea, each morning just after breakfast a pilot and two observers
slip in through the hatch, and the sub is lowered into the sea.

Each afternoon at tea time Alvin bobs to the surface and is hoisted
back on board. It seems such an ordinary procedure, and yet, in between,
the three on board have visited the edge of human knowledge and the edge
of human capability, and the seeming ordinariness is only possible through
the dedication of pilots and technicians to the highest standards.

Is there a British project that generates the same sense of excitement
in those that come into contact with it, the same commitment against all
odds? Perhaps our British phlegm forbids such ventures. But maybe someone
reading this book will be inspired to follow and to create something as
important and enduring as Vine and his successors did.

Joe Cann is professor the Earth Sciences at the University of Leeds.
He works iin marine geology and hopes to convince more people to join in
there.