The Underworld: Deep Travel: A Literary Event 🗓

This is extreme travel … without a doubt the furthest out you can get on planet Earth, and I’m hoping some of you will join me, post Book Passage Travel Writers & Photographers Conference, for a chat with Susan Casey, who takes us into the hadal zone, thirty-six thousand feet below the surface (over 16,000 feet below the abyssal zone) with the sea explorers who’ve taken the risk to deep dive in extraordinarily engineered submersibles to visit the vastly challenging reaches of our planet’s outer limits.

For all of human history, the deep ocean has been a source of wonder and terror, an unknown realm that evoked a singular, compelling question: What’s down there? Unable to answer this for centuries, people believed the deep was a sinister realm of fiendish creatures and deadly peril. But now, cutting-edge technologies allow scientists and explorers to dive miles beneath the surface, and we are beginning to understand this strange and exotic underworld:  A place of soaring mountains, smoldering volcanoes, and valleys 7,000 feet deeper than Everest is high, where tectonic plates collide and separate, and extraordinary life forms operate under different rules. Far from a dark void, the deep is a vibrant realm that’s home to pink gelatinous predators and shimmering creatures a hundred feet long and ancient animals with glass skeletons and sharks that live for half a millennium—among countless other marvels.