The Deep

The Deep is set eight miles beneath the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, located in the waters surrounding the Mariana Archipelago, near the Philippines. It is the deepest known point on Earth, and was first sounded in 1875, to a depth of 26,850 feet. The exploration was undertaken by the Challenger expedition, named after its British vessel, H.M.S. Challenger, which was tasked with the exploration and documentation of the world’s oceans, establishing the field of oceanography. Cutter alludes to this ship in The Deep, naming the descent vehicles Challenger 1-5. Since its original sounding, many expeditions have launched attempts to find the trench’s absolute depth, including crewed descents, the first of which, in 1960, registered a depth of 35,814 feet. The maximum depth is now understood to be 36,069 feet, located in a valley in the Trench’s floor known as Challenger Deep (“Planet Postcard: The Mariana Trench.” National Centers for Environmental Information, 2021).

Cutter grounds the novel’s speculative horror in the real-world scientific and psychological challenges of this extreme environment. The Mariana Trench subjects everything within it to immense pressure, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) calculates at over 16,000 pounds per square inch (“Seven Miles Deep, the Ocean is Still a Noisy Place.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2016). This force, which the novel likens to “twenty-seven jumbo jets” (73), exists in a world of total darkness and near-freezing temperatures. In this abyssal zone, life exists in the form of extremophiles, organisms adapted to hostile conditions, a concept that provides a scientific basis for the novel’s miraculous substance, “ambrosia.” Cutter also refers to the deep-water phenomenon of “marine snow,” which early explorers discovered is simply layers of debris, organic and inorganic, that falls from the upper levels of the ocean, an essential food source for deep-sea organisms.

In the novel, this physically crushing environment serves as a catalyst for psychological collapse. The crew of the Trieste station is subjected to prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, conditions known to induce psychosis. Scientific studies on crews at Antarctic research posts, such as Concordia Station, and on long-duration space missions have documented effects like anxiety, depression, and cognitive distortions. In the novel, these symptoms manifest as the “sea-sillies” (111), driving characters to paranoia and hallucinations, such as Luke’s visions of a giant millipede and his deceased son. By plausibly linking the hostile deep-sea setting to verifiable psychological phenomena, Cutter creates a terrifyingly believable foundation for the characters’ descent into madness, blurring the line between internal and external horrors.