Overview

Above eight thousand metres, the air runs out. At the summit of Everest, the body begins to die. But there is a place on this planet more extreme, more remote, and more poorly understood than the death zone - and it lies not above us, but beneath. The hadal zone begins where the ocean floor drops away into the great trenches: six kilometres down, and deeper. The pressure there is over a thousand times what we feel at the surface. The temperature approaches freezing. The darkness is absolute. No sunlight has ever reached it. And yet humans keep going down. In The Hadal Zone, David Ashby - author of One-Way Ticket and Eight Thousand Metres - turns his attention to the deepest environment accessible to human beings. Drawing on physiology, neuroscience, psychology, and the vivid, often harrowing stories of the people who have descended into the deep, he asks what it actually costs a human body and mind to go there - and why, knowing that cost, anyone would choose to pay it. From the ancient Ama divers of Japan to the saturation divers of the North Sea, from the cave explorers of Florida's underwater passages to James Cameron on the floor of Challenger Deep, The Hadal Zone is a book about limits - physical, psychological, ethical - and about what happens to human beings who refuse to accept them. Authoritative, compulsively readable, and deeply researched, The Hadal Zone is essential reading for anyone drawn to the science of extreme environments and the strange, stubborn compulsion that sends humans into the most hostile places on Earth.

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