The Girl Who Broke the Sea reading tracker

Chapter 2

The Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone

“Deephaven clings, limpet-like, to the side of the valley in the middle of the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone”

The Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone is a real place. It’s a massive, massive region of the Pacific ocean floor, just off the coast of Mexico, covering an area of 4.5M square kilometres. It’s become super important because it’s one of the main regions known to be rich in polymetallic nodules and where the International Seabed Authority has issued a number of exploratory licences to mining companies.

_{Image: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Deep-Sea Mining

“We are the world’s first truly sustainable and fully carbon-neutral mining operation,” he continued, gesturing so expansively I was afraid somebody was going to get clobbered. “A unique collaboration of science and industry. A community dedicated to understanding the ocean depths while helping to meet the world’s energy needs.”

One of the major themes in this book is the issue of deep-sea mining. There are three different kinds of deep-sea mining, but the type this book focuses on is polymetallic nodule mining. Polymetallic nodules are potato sized lumps of copper, cobalt, manganese and iron. By some estimates there’s about $200 trillion worth of metal on the ocean beds and the mining companies are exerting enormous pressure to begin commercial mining of them.

It’s a complex issue. On the one hand the polymetallic nodules contain exactly the metals we need to build the batteries and generators that’ll help us move to a decarbonised economy. If we’re serious about a carbon-neutral future (and we have to be because we can’t ignore climate change) those metals need to come from somewhere, and surface-based mining is not without its social and environmental impact.

But on the other hand, we don’t yet fully understand the potential effects of deep-sea mining. Polymetallic nodule mining is akin to driving a combine harvester across the seabed, the silt plumes and noise generated could be devastating to a much larger area than the mining itself.

If you want to know more about deep-sea mining or about the deep-sea in general, the Deep-Sea Podcast is an excellent, funny and accessible resource. This is their episode on deep-sea mining.

_{Image: Hannes Grobe/AWI, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 3

Dad’s T-Shirt

“There are only 10 kinds of people who understand binary.

Those who do and those who don’t.”

Did you get the joke? It’s a real T-shirt but unless you work with computers it might not make much sense. Computers store and process data in “ones” and “zeros”.

When humans count we use ten different symbols to represent each number: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 … etc. When we want to count above 9 we have to add an extra column… So we write “ten” as: 10. That’s “1” lot of 10s, and “0” lots of 1s.

Computers only have 0 and 1, so they have to add more columns just to get past the number 1. In fact, the way you write 2 in binary is … “1 0” — “1” lot of 2s and “0” lots of 1s.

Hence “10”, which we naturally read as “ten”, is really, “two” in binary.

Exercise for the reader. What’s “3” in binary ?

Chapter 4

Aluminosilicate

“The Command Centre was slung beneath the main rig like the egg sac on a spider, extending over the edge of the valley. On the other side of the glass (sorry, aluminosilicate), external floodlights reflected off the murky water.”

Windows are a big challenge at the bottom of the ocean. 5000m down, the weight of the ocean pushing against the hull of a submersible is roughly five thousand tonnes — that’s about the same weight as a block of flats.

Until the 1920s the only option was to use glass, but glass is susceptible to cracking, and … that’s bad at the bottom of the ocean.

In the 1920s, fused quartz became available, and in the late 1940s plexiglass came into use. In 1960, Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, used a bathyscaphe with 18cm thick plexiglass viewports to descend to the deepest point on the ocean, 11km down.

Aluminosilicate, which they use on Deephaven, is actually the name of the material they make phone screens out of, and that would be pretty rubbish at the bottom of the ocean. But I liked the name, so I went with it.

On Deephaven, the key feature of aluminosilicate is that it can heal itself if it’s cracked, something which saves Lily on more than one occasion. It’s not widely in use yet, but self-healing polymer glass is actually a real thing.

Telemetry Grid

“Deeper still, I could see the dim red glow of the telemetry grid—the fifty-kilometre-square lattice of homing beacons that the CRABs used to navigate when they harvested the polymetallic nodules the rig had been built to collect.”

There’s a bit of wishful thinking here on my part. Deephaven is mining a fifty kilometre square piece of the ocean bed — that’s probably a bit on the small side. By some estimates, a mining company would have to mine 300 square km a year just to break even. Once you multiply that by several companies (16 already have exploratory licences in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone) the impact on the ocean floor could be immense.

There are already 1 million square kms of the Clarion Clipperton Zone licensed for exploratory mining, that’s about 20 times the area of the United Kingdom.

Chapter 5

Euglenoid

“I believe it to be a new species of euglenoid. It is eukaryotic, and, I suspect, a previously undiscovered form of protist. It possesses a structured bioluminescence and a remarkable ability for macro-organisation, it exhibits a higher-order microbial intelligence at a level that has not been observed before…”

The science of the deep-sea is still very new. One of the deep-sea scientists I spoke to as part of researching this book told me that they discover something entirely new to science every time they go down there.

So a bioluminescent euglenoid that can survive in the deep ocean and exhibits a higher-order microbial intelligence… why not?

But this is really the crux of the problem with deep-sea mining. There’s still so much we don’t know about the Abyssal Plains and the effects of attempting to mine them. Industry wants to move faster than the science says is safe, but the potential damage, and the risk of destroying whole ecosystems before we even know they exist, is enormous.

_{Image: Deuterostome, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 8

Roustabout

“A look passed between the three men. The largest – a roustabout, he told us, whatever that was – furrowed his brow. “Deephaven? That’s where you’re going?”

“That’s right,” Mum said, her smile faltering. “Have you heard of it?”

They nodded slowly. Suddenly nobody looked particularly hungry.

“What’s wrong?” Mum asked.

“It’s just stories,” a thin-faced man said.

“What kind of stories?”

“There’s things down there,” the roustabout said. “Things we haven’t seen before.””

Roustabout and toolpusher are real job titles used by the oil industry. A roustabout is one of the more junior roles, somebody joining the industry without previous qualifications would most likely find a job as a roustabout. A toolpusher – despite sounding like a pretty lowly role – is actually a very senior role, equivalent to a foreman, or lead engineer.

You’ll find a bunch of other unusual job titles in the Acknowledgements at the end of the book, but note that not all of those are real. Try to guess which ones are real and which are made up.

Chapter 13

International Seabed Authority

“Alban sighed and laid down his spoon. He unscrewed the cap from the salt shaker and placed the cap and shaker on the table in front of him. “Carter represents the Consortium,” he said, tapping the shaker on the table. “He’s on the hook for making this place profitable. But we only get a licence to mine because an independent science team oversees the whole thing.” He took the cap and placed it on top of the shaker. “The International Seabed Authority laid that out in law decades ago,” he added. “Carter and the Consortium hate the science team because they think the scientists get in the way of their quotas.” He upended the salt shaker and watched the grains trickle out onto the table. “And the science team hate Carter because they know he’ll pave this place over and turn it into a multi-storey car park if he gets half a chance.” Without moving the shaker, Alban twisted off the cap and let the whole shaker’s worth of salt scatter onto the table. “Economic gain and progress versus scientific advancement and preserving the ecosystem, blah blah. Didn’t you listen to anything at the training centre?””

The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is real. It’s a collaboration designed to safeguard the deep-sea, but also to set out the regulations that will control deep-sea mining.

It’s a mammoth task. The ISA is responsible for roughly half of the total area of the world’s oceans.

And there is much controversy. Already, a million square kilometres of the Pacific ocean is licensed for exploratory mining, and the mining companies are exerting intense pressure to allow commercial mining to begin. Unsurprisingly, industry wants to move faster than science says is safe.

Deephaven is set in a near future where all that has happened, and the outcome is a very limited amount of commercial mining under the watchful eye of a team of scientists. But even in this optimistic world, it seems, the conflict between science and industry will be hard to avoid.

Chapter 15

Emergency Reactor Scram

““What do you know about the ERS system?” he asked, feigning innocence.

I glanced at the button on the nearby wall with the little sign directly beneath it. “Emergency Reactor Scram,” I said. “What about it?”

“Do you know what happens if you push one of those buttons?”

“More or less,” I answered cautiously.”

Deephaven has a large number of Emergency Reactor Scram buttons, designed as a last line of defence to shut down the fusion reactor if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, they prove to be a pretty serious temptation for poor Lily.

A reactor scram is a real term that dates back to the first experiments with fission reactors back in the 1940s. Fission reactions can sometimes run out of control, which can be incredibly dangerous, so a “scram” button is required to trigger an emergency shutdown. There’s some wild theories about where the word comes from, with “Safety Control Rod Axe Man” being one of the most popular. Much more likely though is that it stems from a conversation between two of the scientists working on Chicago Pile 1, an early, experimental reactor. One scientist asked the other what to do in the event of an emergency, after hitting the emergency shutdown button. The other replied: “You scram… Get out of here!”

_{Image: Alan Levine from Strawberry, United StatesRotated, cropped and restored by Bomazi., CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 17

Amphipods

“I could hardly make sense of what I was seeing. The machines slung on the rack looked a bit like mechanical shrimp, each one with a black dome at the front like a giant, insectoid eye, and four slender antennae sprouting from the outer rim. They rocked slightly with the movement of the rack. Their “bodies” were hunched up behind the dome and made from a series of overlapping plates which tapered into a narrow “tail” which hung down towards the back. Eight pairs of legs hung below each body, the front two solid, polycarbonate claws, the rest looking more like coarse black ropes coated in stiff bristles.”

Here’s a picture of a real Amphipod on which I based the design for the Amphipods on Deephaven. Amphipods are the same class of animal as shrimp, but much smaller — at most, about 2cm in length.

_{Image: Uwe kils, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 18

Stalactites

“My brain seemed to watch from a long way away. Rock moved rapidly around me. Stalactites and ragged spears of rock reached out. Where was I? A cave? A passageway? I can’t have just driven into a cave, I’m just not that lucky.”

Think about how stalactites form – water, trickling through a crack or seam in the rock, evaporates, leaving a tiny deposit of whatever minerals were dissolved in it. Over time, that deposit forms a funnel for more water to trickle down, and so the deposits lengthen to form what looks like a spear of rock.

So … there is a problem. Stalactites only form in air. In fact, there are submerged caves where there are in fact stalactites, and their presence tells us that those submerged caves used to be above sea-level.

Was the Rift once above sea-level? Or maybe Lily just saw what she thought were stalactites but were in fact some other unusual rock formation.

That’s the kind of mystery that a scientist would get very curious about.

Chapter 21

Pouring Lemonade in the Petrol Tank

“I dumped my can of lemonade in his petrol tank and I felt a lot better for it. I don’t know why I felt better, I just did.

I always did. For a while, at least.

I’d done this before, to Dad’s car, and his car had caught fire in the driveway. It was a small, manageable fire that was quickly put out. A small manageable moment in which the universe listened to me for once. If I’d thought anything at that moment, it was that the same thing would happen to Talha’s car.”

Cars don’t really catch fire if you dump lemonade into the petrol tank. But you still shouldn’t do it.

Chapter 25

Ari Sigurðsson — Chief Operations Officer

“Ari laughed shortly, “We’re five kilometres under the surface of the ocean, Lily, and we’re living on top of a fusion reactor.” He flashed me a wicked smile. “We’re fine. We have thousands of fail-safes to cut the power if there’s a problem; you just have to keep on top of things, that’s all. This is … it’s just normal stuff. Rigs have bad days, just like people.””

Ari is my favourite character in the book. He’s an amalgam of every practical, capable, lovely human being I’ve ever met. But a lot of inspiration came especially from the brave, sturdy, remarkable people I met at Icelandic Search and Rescue when I volunteered in Greece with NetHope back in 2015.

Chapter 28

CRABs

“Below the main rig, the display showed four hundred and seventy two CRABs as pinpricks of red light moving around the valley. Still running on battery power for now, I imagined them sifting through the rubble of the ocean bed like crusty old beachcombers, picking out glistening clumps of rock to take back to the main rig.”

The problem with deep-sea mining is that most proposals are pretty much exactly like driving a combine harvester across the bottom of the seabed. It’s going to be loud and that noise is going to extend through the ocean for hundreds of kilometres. It’s going to kick up lots of silt as well, and again, those silt plumes could travel and disrupt marine life for many hundreds of kilometres beyond the actual mining site.

Understanding the effects of the noise pollution and silt plumes is a very active area of research, with science trying its hardest to understand if deep-sea mining can be sustainable and under what conditions.

In Deephaven, I like to think we’ll find a better, less destructive way to harvest the polymetallic nodules. I imagine robots creeping delicately over the seabed, selecting only the nodules that are not already harbouring life, maybe even replacing the nodules with ceramic substitutes so that the shelter provided by them is not lost.

There are proposals along these lines out there already, but whether they are effective or not remains to be seen.

_{Image: ROV-Team/GEOMAR, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 30

Electromagnetic Fields

“I looked at Evan and saw that his eyes were wide with shock. They’d warned us about this at the training centre: the fusion reactor relies on electromagnets to contain the plasma, but it was possible for those fields to destabilize, collapse, and escape into the surrounding area. Massive electromagnetic fields and a rig made out of steel – you didn’t need a physics degree to know that that was a thoroughly bad thing. The eddy fields would rip us out of the ground like a daisy, Ari had warned us on our first day.”

I couldn’t resist allowing a little bit of my physics background to creep in. Eddy fields are electric currents that are induced in a conductor in the presence of a changing magnetic field. The current and the magnetic field then interact and create a force.

It’s actually the mechanism used for regenerative braking that you get on electric cars — the eddy field is what slows the car down.

But on Deephaven, the fields are much more destructive, and as the euglenoid causes the containment field to fluctuate, those forces threaten to destroy the rig.

Survival Suits

“Now the shape drifted to a stop in front of me. A beige rugby ball, a giant inflatable onesie made from congealing memory foam. Small ciliate thrusters trembled on the upper arms as it fought to match my speed and rotation in the currents. It came closer, and I noticed a tiny, illuminated porthole moulded into the foam. Evan’s face stared at me from inside – white, terrified, determined. Some kind of survival suit, I thought.”

The biggest problem with the ocean — apart from the fact that it’s near freezing and you can’t breathe — is the pressure. Think about how heavy it would be if you balanced a bucket of water on your head. Five km below the surface the weight of the water pressing on you from all sides would be about the same as a medium sized office block.

The survival suits on Deephaven are designed to protect you from that pressure, whilst also providing air and keeping you warm. They’re kind of like mini-mini-submersibles, with just enough power to allow you to survive in the open deep-sea until help arrives.

They don’t exist, unfortunately.

They’re based on Submarine Survival Suits, but real submarine survival suits aren’t as advanced as the ones on Deephaven. They provide air, buoyancy, and protection from the elements. They also contain a single-person liferaft, so that when you pop up on the surface like a cork, you can wait in your life raft for rescue. The little pouch in the suit is actually a portable hot-chocolate making machine.

Ok, that last part isn’t true.

Chapter 31

Tardigrades

“I slid, winded, my momentum carrying me along the angled roof. I twisted, scrambling for something to hold onto. The clawed hands of the survival suit scraped, but they had nothing to grip. The suckers caught and then popped off in a series of disheartening mwop-mwop-mwop-mwop sounds.”

When I first wrote about the survival suits, I modelled them after tardigrades. Tardigrades are renowned for being the toughest creatures on the planet. They’re been found frozen in ice in Antarctica, on mountain tops, and in the Amazon. They’ve survived exposure to open space.

Later, I liked it better just calling them survival suits, but some of the characteristics of tardigrades remain.

_{Image: Schokraie E, Warnken U, Hotz-Wagenblatt A, Grohme MA, Hengherr S, et al. (2012), CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons}

Chapter 41

Ciliate Drives

“My thrusters strained as I tore through the ocean. I was numb with fear, my thoughts narrowed to a single point. I dropped fast. My ciliate drive pushed me over the uneven seabed towards the telemetry grid.”

Cilia are hair-like cells used by some microorganisms to propel themselves along — they also exist inside the human body, as in the photograph below.

For microorganisms they’re a pretty efficient way of getting around, but for anything bigger they don’t work so well (although there’s some pretty interesting research with microrobot designs). I used them on the Amphipods because… well, it seemed cooler than regular engines.

_{Image: Charles Daghlian, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}