A few years ago, I started a Dewey Decimal reading challenge, where my goal is to read one book from each of the 100 divisions of the Dewey Decimal Classification system. There are ten divisions for each of the ten main Dewey classes (Religion, Social Sciences, Language, Literature, Technology, etc.), so it covers a very broad range of topics, many of which I might never engage with if not for this challenge. I'm working through it gradually, reading about ten books for the challenge each year. For the Earth Sciences & Geology division (Dewey numbers 550-559), I've selected Susan Casey's highly accessible book about oceanography and submarine geology, The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean.
Casey does a magnificent job of illustrating why the deep ocean continues to become the subject of fascination, exploration, and research for a growing number of people, and how vitally important this part of our world is for our climate and planetary health. It's a vast, dark expanse filled with creatures more alien than much of what we've imagined exists on other planets, and much of it has been explored and studied for the first time only in the last three or four decades. Casey's great skill is to bring this alien world to vivid life in the reader's mind through evocative descriptive prose:
"He could see mounds of black pillow lava, and rust-colored mineral deposits that signaled the presence of iron, and strands of bacteria waving lazily in the current. Jumbles of rocks glistened with volcanic glass. It was a landscape of stark Plutonian beauty."
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